[SIERA] FYI

[Dick Young]

As Telecom Reels
>From Storm Damage,
Ham Radios Hum

By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS
Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 6, 2005; Page A19

MONROE, La. -- In a shelter here, 300 miles north of New Orleans, Theo 
McDaniel took his plight to a young man fiddling with a clunky, 
outdated-looking radio.

Mr. McDaniel, a 25-year-old barber, had evacuated New Orleans with his wife 
and two small children more than a week ago and since then has had no 
contact with his brother or his aunt. The last he heard, his 42-year-old 
aunt was clinging to her roof.

"We've got to get a message down there to help them," he said. The man at 
the radio sent the information to the emergency-operations center across 
town, which relayed it to rescue units in New Orleans. Later in the weekend, 
Mr. McDaniel learned that food and water were on the way to his trapped 
brother and his brother's young family. He has heard nothing about his aunt.

With Hurricane Katrina having knocked out nearly all the high-end emergency 
communications gear, 911 centers, cellphone towers and normal fixed phone 
lines in its path, ham-radio operators have begun to fill the information 
vacuum. "Right now, 99.9% of normal communications in the affected region is 
nonexistent," says David Gore, the man operating the ham radio in the Monroe 
shelter. "That's where we come in."

In an age of high-tech, real-time gadgetry, it's the decidedly unsexy ham 
radio -- whose technology has changed little since World War II -- that is 
in high demand in ravaged New Orleans and environs. The Red Cross issued a 
request for about 500 amateur radio operators -- known as "hams" -- for the 
260 shelters it is erecting in the area. The American Radio Relay League, a 
national association of ham-radio operators, has been deluged with requests 
to find people in the region. The U.S. Coast Guard is looking for hams to 
help with its relief efforts.

Ham radios, battery operated, work well when others don't in part because 
they are simple. Each operator acts as his own base station, requiring only 
his radio and about 50 feet of fence wire to transmit messages thousands of 
miles. Ham radios can send messages on multiple channels and in myriad ways, 
including Morse code, microwave frequencies and even email.

Then there are the ham-radio operators themselves, a band of radio 
enthusiasts who spend hours ragchewing with each other even during normal 
times. They are often the first to get messages in and out of disaster 
areas, in part because they are everywhere. (The ARRL estimates there are 
250,000 licensed hams in the U.S.) Sometimes they are the only source of 
information in the first hours following a disaster. "No matter how good the 
homeland-security system is, it will be overwhelmed," says Thomas Leggett, a 
retired mill worker manning a ham radio in the operations center here. "You 
don't hear about us, but we are there."

SLIDELL, a town 30 miles northeast of New Orleans, was directly hit by the 
hurricane and remains virtually cut off from the outside world. One of the 
few, if not the only, communications links is Michael King, a retired Navy 
captain, operating a ham radio out of a Slidell hospital.

"How are you holding up, Mike?" asked Sharon Riviere into a ham-radio 
microphone at Monroe's operations center. She and her husband, Ron, who is 
the president of the Slidell ham-radio club, had evacuated before the storm 
to the home of some fellow ham-radio enthusiasts in Monroe. She said Mr. 
King had been working 20-hour days since the storm hit.

Crackling static and odd, garbled sounds followed her question to Mr. King. 
Then he replied: "It's total devastation here. I've got 18 feet of water at 
my house. Johnny's Café down there has water up to its roof."

Ms. Riviere asked about her own home, which is not far from Mr. King's. 
"It's full of mud," Mr. King replied. "Looks like someone's been slugging it 
out in there."

Ham radios are often most effective as one link in a chain of communication 
devices. Early last week, someone trapped with 15 people on a roof of a New 
Orleans home tried unsuccessfully to get through to a 911 center on his 
cellphone. He was able to call a relative in Baton Rouge, who in turn called 
another relative, Sybil Hayes, in Broken Arrow, Okla. Ms. Hayes, whose 
81-year-old aunt was among those stranded on the New Orleans roof, then 
called the Red Cross in Broken Arrow, which handed the message to its 
affiliated ham-radio operator, Ben Joplin.

Via stations in Oregon, Idaho and Louisiana, Mr. Joplin got the message to 
rescue workers who were able to save the 15 people on the roof, according to 
the ARRL, based in Newington, Conn. "We are like the Pony Express," says the 
26-year-old Mr. Gore, wearing black cowboy boots. "One way or the other, 
even by hand, we will get you the message."

Mr. Gore, who is in charge of the northeastern district of Louisiana for the 
Amateur Radio Emergency Service, has spent a lot of time the past week at 
the Monroe shelter, helping evacuees try to track missing friends and 
relatives.

Last Monday, Danita Alexander of Violet, La., came to a ham operator in the 
Monroe shelter asking about her 96-year-old grandfather, Willie Bright, who 
had been in a nursing home in New Orleans. The next day, she got word back 
from a ham operator that he had been safely transferred to a shelter near 
New Orleans. "We can't do enough of these," says Mark Ketchell, who runs the 
ARES branch in Monroe.

Nevertheless, the ham-radio community feels under threat. Telecom companies 
want to deliver broadband Internet connections over power lines, which 
ham-radio operators say distorts communications in the surrounding area. 
Since hams are "amateurs," there is little lobbying money to fight such 
changes, they add.

The hams also get little respect from telecommunications-equipment 
companies, such as Motorola Inc. "Something is better than nothing, that's 
right," says Jim Screeden, who runs all of Motorola's repair teams in the 
field for its emergency-response business. "But ham radios are pretty close 
to nothing." Mr. Screeden says ham radios can take a long time to relay 
messages and work essentially as "party lines," with multiple parties 
talking at once. Says Mr. Leggett at the Monroe operations center: "We are 
the unwanted stepchild. But when the s- hits the fan, who are you going to 
call?"