[TCARC-NTX] ARRL Letter to Congress

[David Johnson KB5YLG]

>From www.arrl.com:

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ARRL President Jim Haynie's Testimony
Submitted to the House Government Reform Committee
September 15, 2005 


Chairman Davis and Ranking Member Waxman, as President
of ARRL, the National Association for Amateur Radio,
it gives me great pleasure to provide this statement
for the record to the Committee on the successful
efforts of Amateur Radio operators providing
communications for First Responders, Disaster Relief
agencies, and countless individuals in connection with
the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. As has been
proven consistently and repeatedly in the past, when
communications systems fail due to a wide-area or
localized natural disaster, Amateur Radio works, right
away, all the time. This report is not, therefore, a
statement of concern about what must be changed or
improved. It is, rather, a report on what is going
right, and what works, in emergency communications in
the Gulf Coast, and what can be depended on to work
the next time there is a natural disaster, and the
times after that. 

Right now, an all-volunteer "army" of approximately
1,000 FCC-licensed Amateur Radio operators is
providing continuous high-frequency, VHF and UHF
communications for State, local and Federal emergency
workers in and around the affected area in Louisiana,
Mississippi, and Alabama. These communications are
provided for served agencies such as the American
National Red Cross and the Salvation Army, and to
facilitate interoperability between and among these
agencies; First Responders; FEMA, VOAD (National
Volunteers Active in Disasters) and other agencies.
Trained volunteer Amateur Radio operators are also
providing health and welfare communications from
within the affected area to the rest of the United
States and the world. In the past week, the Coast
Guard, the Red Cross, and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency all put out calls for volunteer
Amateur Radio operators to provide communications,
because phone lines and cell sites were inoperative,
and public safety communications facilities were
overwhelmed due to loss of repeater towers and the
large number of First Responders in the area. Amateur
Radio operators responded en masse: Approximately 200
Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) trained
communicators responded to the Gulf Coast in the past
week. The Red Cross has now said, a week after they
issued the call, that they have enough radio operators
and Amateur Radio communications facilities. The
number of Amateur Radio operators providing
communications in the three States, either deployed or
awaiting relief duty on-site or at a reserve facility
in Montgomery, Alabama, swelled from 800 to 1,000 in a
week. Many more thousands of radio amateurs outside
the affected area are regularly monitoring radio
traffic and relaying thousands of messages concerning
the welfare and location of victims. 

The principal reason why Amateur Radio works when
other communications systems fail during natural
disasters is that Amateur Radio is not
infrastructure-dependent, and is decentralized.
Amateurs are trained in emergency communications. They
are disciplined operators, and their stations are, in
general, portable and reliable. High-frequency Amateur
Radio communications, used substantially in this
emergency communications effort, require no fixed
repeaters, cable or wirelines. Portable repeaters for
VHF and UHF communications can be provided via mobile
facilities (many Amateur Radio groups have deployed
communications vans in the Gulf Coast for precisely
this purpose) in affected areas instantly. There are
now approximately 670,000 licensees of the FCC in the
Amateur Service at present, which assures the presence
of Amateur stations in most areas of the country.
Emergency communications are conducted not only by
voice, but also by high-speed data transmissions using
state-of-the-art digital communications software known
as WinLink. As Motorola's Director of Communications
and Public Affairs stated yesterday: "Amateur Radio
communications benefit us all by having a distributed
architecture and frequency agility that enables you to
set up faster in the early phases of disaster recovery
and can provide flexible and diverse
communications...Motorola believes that the Amateur
Radio spectrum provides valuable space for these
important communications." 

In Mississippi, FEMA dispatched Amateur Radio
operators to hospitals and evacuation shelters to send
emergency calls 24 hours per day. At airports in Texas
and Alabama, radio amateurs track evacuees and notify
the Baton Rouge operations center of their whereabouts
so their families will be able to find them. Amateur
Radio operators in New Orleans participated directly
in locating stranded persons, because local cellphone
calls could not be made by stranded victims due to the
inoperative wireline systems in the area. The Red
Cross deploys qualified amateur radio volunteers at
its 250 shelter and feeding station locations,
principally in Mississippi, Alabama and northern
Florida. 

The local 911 operators could not handle calls from
relatives calling in from outside the affected area,
so they passed those "health and welfare" inquiries to
amateur radio operators stationed at the 911 call
centers, for relay of information back to New Orleans
to facilitate rescue missions for stranded persons. 

Amateur Radio has provided a communications link
between Coast Guard helicopters and emergency centers
because the ambulance crews couldn't contact the
helicopters directly. In Texas, Amateur Radio
operators are working 24 hours per day in the
Astrodome in Houston and the Reliant Center next door,
and as well in the Harris County Emergency Operations
Center. In San Antonio, at the Kelly Air Force Base,
radio amateurs from Montana are providing local and
national health and welfare communications for
evacuees. These examples are repeated throughout the
Gulf Coast and in the cities in the southern states
receiving large numbers of evacuees. 

The Salvation Army operates its own Amateur Radio
communications system using Amateur Radio volunteers,
known as SATERN. In the Hurricane Katrina effort,
SATERN has joined forces with the federal SHARES
program (SHAred RESources), which is a network of
government, military and Military Affiliate Radio
Service (MARS) radio stations. MARS is an organized
network of Amateur Radio stations affiliated with the
different branches of the armed forces to provide
volunteer communications. SATERN has, in the Katrina
relief effort, received over 48,000 requests for
emergency communications assistance, and the
affiliation with the SHARES program allows the
Salvation Army to utilize Federal frequencies to
communicate with agencies directly. This is but one
example of the innovative and reliable means by which
Amateur Radio right now provides organized
interoperability on a scope far beyond that now being
planned for local and State public safety systems. 

Amateur Radio is largely invisible to both the FCC and
to Congress on a daily basis, because it is virtually
self-regulating and self-administered. It is only
during emergencies that the Amateur Radio Service is
in the spotlight. At other times, emergency
communications and technical self-training and
advancement of telecommunications technology occupy
licensees' time. For the first time ever, in
recognition of the work of Amateur Radio Operators in
this Hurricane Relief effort, the Corporation for
National And Community Service (CNCS), which provides
strategic critical support to volunteer organizations
which in turn provide services to communities, has
made a $100,000 grant supplement to ARRL to support
the Katrina emergency communications efforts in the
Gulf Coast. This enables ARRL to reimburse to a small
degree, on a per diem basis, some of the expenses that
radio amateurs incur personally in traveling to the
Gulf Coast to volunteer their time and effort. The
CNCS grant is an extension of ARRL's three-year,
Homeland Security training grant, which has to date
provided certification in emergency communication
training protocols to approximately 5,500 Amateur
Radio volunteers over the past three years. 

ARRL wishes to commend the FCC's Enforcement Bureau
for its efficient and successful efforts during the
ongoing Hurricane relief in monitoring the Amateur
Radio High Frequency bands to prevent or quickly
remedy incidents of interference. 

The Committee should be aware that this vast volunteer
resource is always at the disposal of the Federal
government. The United States absolutely can rely on
the Amateur Radio Service. Amateur Radio provides
immediate, high-quality communications that work every
time, when all else fails. 


Respectfully submitted, 

ARRL--the National Association for Amateur Radio 

By: Jim Haynie, President 


--- automatic signature follows...

David Johnson
MCP,MCSE,MCSD,MCDBA,CWS
david at justcalldavid.com
kb5ylg at yahoo.com

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Emergency and public service communications,
a hobby of myriad facets, an enhancement to any
other hobby:  The Amateur Radio Service.

Find out more at http://www.arrl.org

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