Jeff KE9V picked up on a news item about the ham radio response in the recent Oregon floods. (The ARRL has a more detailed report here.) There is a news report from KPTV that has this great quote in it:
“One of the problems in this is always communication,” Gov. Ted Kulongoski said after a visit Tuesday to Vernonia and a fly-over there and other affected areas. “I’m going to tell you who the heroes were from the very beginning of this…the ham radio operators. These people just came in and actually provided a tremendous communication link to us.”
KE9V has some great comments in his blog about this. Basically, Jeff says he is glad that ham radio can once again come to the rescue in the face of a communications breakdown. But then he questions how our tax dollars are being spent on the public safety communication systems that seem to fail just when they are needed. He has a point here.
In my state (Colorado), the public safety agencies have migrated to a statewide 800 MHz system (based on APCO Project 25). This has really helped with interoperability issues but the system is known to be inadequate for high levels of radio traffic. This is not rocket science…you can evaluate the number of radio sites, the capacity of each site and how many radio transceivers and transmissions that need to be supported. The answer is when a wide scale emergency occurs, the 800 MHz system is likely to be overloaded.
It is great that ham radio can fill in the gaps, but these systems should be designed to operate in adverse conditions.
73, Bob K0NR