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Satellite phones work well for one-to-one communication or similar; if you need an emergency phone for your own use, or a phone for use in isolated areas away from any cell tower, that's what you want.

But for broadcast communication and coordination in a disaster (e.g. "which hospital can take a busload of people", or "family seeking missing person <name>"), amateur radio works very well.

Drawing from direct personal experience in the defense contracting industry, I can guarantee you that if a major Class-A clusterfuck disaster hits somewhere in the US, you'll see the military and federal response heavily using satellite. In-the-clear VHF, UHF and shortwave radio, sure, a lot of it, and the military equivalents thereof for their own communications, but you'd also see things like homeland security command trucks with 1.8 meter VSAT terminals on the roof parked outside major metro areas' hospitals.

Satellite can also be used to quickly restore portions of a badly damaged telecommunications system (mobile phone carriers and LTE networks) by giving an islanded/disconnected network a new multi-Mbps uplink to the outside world. With the right ground terminal equipment and transponder capacity you can do 130 Mbps full duplex through a relatively small portable satellite terminal. Such a pipe can be connected to a LEC network, to a mobile phone carrier, to a major ISP, to just about anything given the right network engineering expertise.

FEMA spent the money to equip US local first responders with short wave radios as a backup comm system. But they have trouble getting non-FEMA agencies to use them and test them occasionally.

The problem isn't the radios. It's that the culture of operating with very limited communications bandwidth and slow message forwarding has been lost. Writing out messages on paper to be read over the air and copied by hand at the other end is totally alien today. You have to design your operations to minimize long distance traffic, and nobody does that any more.

Low-bandwidth, text based communications? There have been purely text based IRC servers (and XMPP/Jabber) on SIPRnet since 2003 or around then. All IP data and frequently implemented over geostationary satellite. It was interesting seeing what people in FOBs in Kunar province want to talk about. Very much agreed that getting non military people to learn communications discipline would be difficult.

They still use IRC over SIPR.

Sounds like having relatively high bandwidth won't be a problem. Isn't bandwidth available a bit arbitrary any way? Shouldn't my device just be able to communicate anywhere in the spectrum with handlers for all legacy protocols?

The issue is routing. HF Amateur radio as used for emergency purposes routes by manual re-copying of messages between an ad-hoc network of stations. This is basically WWII technology. Works OK, but very limited traffic capacity.

There are VHF repeater chains, AX-25, and other fancier ham infrastructure, but if that's up and running, the cellular network is probably up, too.

The next ARRL Field Day is June 25-26. This is supposed to be practice for emergency communications, but it's really just a DX contest. Everybody just tries to contact other stations at random; there's no attempt to set up a net. You'll see antennas in parking lots. Visit the people there and see what they're up to.

I started to agree with you but then remember text messages. Older people often complained about younger people sending such cryptic messages with all kinds of short-hand over extremely-limited bandwidth of text. Even had delays in the network they got used to. This repeated with Twitter minus the huge delays.

So, I think they could use it if you gave them a limited interface with a popup like "Warning: This connection is slower than dial-up. Send messages frugally like on text messaging. If images, send tiny and compressed ones with lower, quality settings. Don't even think about video. Delays in responses could occur at any time."

I figure they'd get the idea and adjust.

That'll all work great for the government workers, but there's always going to be a window between when those comms are available for the government and when cell service is restored to the point you can coordinate with family and friends reliably.

> You'll see the military and federal response

For the whole life of the service the regulations state that one of the many reasons for the service to exist is to help the public during emergencies. And for that entire time, there's been endless philosophical / political arguments over if helping the government equals helping the public or if the government and corporations can take care of themselves or only take care of themselves while hams help the general public. Does the public mean random dude off the street or does it mean licensed ham radio operators or does it only mean the government and corporations or every possible combination of the three? Furthermore there's a dimension of some people see emcomm as a calling for survivalism and societal collapse and post-earthquake exclusively, whereas 99.99% of actual over the air emcomm activity is just another boring day until one guy reports a car accident or medical emergency in a rural area with no cell coverage and it'll never make the news.

I don't want to fight the argument here, but the point I'm making is for decades there's been healthy debate, so if the loudest definition is making cognitive dissonance in your head, that's OK, because a very significant fraction of the ham population sees things like you do. For all values of what you're seeing.

Ham radio is extraordinarily big and one thing many people have in common across the entire hobby is a viewpoint that their small corner of the very large hobby is the only real ham radio and their interpretation of the rules is the only correct interpretation. That is about the only ham radio stereotype that is really true most of the time. If someone claims the only "real ham radio" or "real path to ham radio" is local FM repeaters or 75 meter SSB voice or contesting or not contesting or emcomm or not emcomm or restoring old radios or building new radios or microwave experimentation or pretty much any ham radio activity, the only thing that is certain is they're completely wrong.

That's fine for governments and corporations, but expensive for most individuals.

Also, a geostationary amateur radio satellite is being launched in 2017: http://www.kb6nu.com/first-amateur-radio-geosynchronous-sate...

Wow, that sounds awfully fancy. How much does all of that cost? Subscription required?

Seems like Ham would be much cheaper and just as good, funneling local emergency communications into more sophisticated setups (that are probably owning and operating satphones for you).

I think if you find your local 911 call centre/sheriffs office or other major facility that will meet the category of "continuity of essential services", you'll find that it already has several Iridium phones active on standby accounts funded by FEMA/US DHS money. So the money is already being spent. For VSAT, a great deal of the DHS funded geostationary federal government satellite capacity (in terms of chunks of kHz on FDD transponders in space) is already there and being paid for on long term contracts whether it's actively in use or not.

And also, you can travel with it to India

http://m.timesofindia.com/city/kochi/Satellite-phone-spells-...

I know more than ten people who've been to India with Iridium phones and no problems. They're "technically" against the law in the same way that 80% of the adult content on the Internet is in violation of Indian law. There's all kinds of stuff that's technically illegal in India and laws that everybody ignores in daily practice. What you're looking at in that news article is the end result of a failed bribery/shakedown attempt by corrupt Indian police and a stupid white foreigner who was too dumb to know when to pay Rs1000.

I wouldn't put it in the same category as porn. Indian authorities are pretty paranoid about satellite phones since it is the preferred form of communication of terrorists. Bribing doesn't work always, especially when dealing with central-government authorities.

That's the reason for the ban?

Yes. It was discovered to be used by terrorists in the past (esp. the 2008 Mumbai attacks).

No, it's the government's excuse to crack down on foreign journalists poking their noses into places where they don't want them to go (Maoist insurgencies, for example). Getting a "burner" phone in India on GSM networks is ridiculously easy and costs about ten bucks. Actual terrorists like Laskar-e-Taiba are well aware that using a satellite phone is one of the quickest and most effective ways to get your calls listened to by the NSA. Iridium has effectively zero security and all of its calls pass through a few centralized gateways.

You raise some good points. However, amateur radio has a larger install base than satphones, and isn't dependent on any external equipment that can't be carried on one's person/vehicle (like a satellite).

Might want to look into how many local amateur radio clubs' mountaintop VHF / UHF radio repeaters are dependent on the electrical grid continuing to function... They're not as autonomous as they seem at first glance. Shortwave and other bands for longer distance communications are not as dependent upon regional repeaters, sure, but take a look at how many VHF/UHF repeater sites are wired into the same grid as the other telecom things on their hills. Not very many of them have been built as fully off-grid photovoltaic/wind power.

So much this and worse.

In my state the ARES/RACES people got together and made a "statewide emergency network" of repeaters using local IP for interconnect. Our rural WISP arm provides the IP for several of their repeaters (incidentally we also provide IP to local gov). Our gear: 2-3 days of battery and industrial/carrier networking equipment. Their gear: APC UPS with (optimistically) 45 minutes of runtime powering a old Gateway P2 running WinXP.

Maybe 20 years ago they would have been useful, but post 9/11 FEMA/DHS grants have been very good to local emergency comms. My county now has their own towers with a ton of batteries, generator, and 11Ghz/18Ghz interconnect.

I'm just not seeing a scenario where their repeaters stay online, traditional comms fail, and we still have enough societal function where you can call for (or provide) help.

If there is a megascale disaster here (Seattle/Vancouver area), I know who I'm going to for my emergency electricity needs to power communciations gear, and it's certainly not the local amateur radio greybeards... It's the ISP network engineering people who have 'enable' on the core routers for many of the larger regional ASNs and have been collecting things like 40kW diesel generators for their houses, and datacenters with massive fuel storage on site.

It seems like you've got a chip on your shoulder against hams(greybeards, seriously?).

Not all of us live in a major metro area, where I'm at it's ~20mi to a major city so VHF/UHF fits the needs we have.

Question, did you participate in Cascadia Rising? Just about all of our local ham club did. We've had some pretty serious things happen down south here over the last few years and the local club has always stepped up. They also do a fantastic job of helping with community communication for events in remote areas that don't have cell coverage.

I totally get geeking out over the latest and greatest tech, but that doesn't mean you need to dismiss a whole group of people who would be happy to help in any situation.

(not OP, but since I agree with most of their comments in this thread...)

So, I knew a older ham once. Dude owned a commercial tower & paging company. Built his own power supplies because COTS switching power supplies were "too noisy". Gave me one to run our gear at one of his towers before we switched to -48 rectifiers. Awesome guy. Really knew his stuff on anything radio (RF, tower, grounding, etc) Got offed in a stupid employee payment dispute :(

Unfortunately most of the hams I know aren't like that. There's a type: generally older men with decent-sized egos who have been around forever and see ham insider tech (winlink, "high speed" data measured in bps) as the end all-be all of comms. They stress how they are first responders doing emergency communications. Throw lights on their cars, etc. Sometimes they've been around long enough to get a seat at the table and then everyone has to work around them. Generally ARES/RACES-affiliated, not SKYWARN. I haven't had any bad encounters with SKYWARN folks...

Of course, I'm sure there are a ton of decent hams around that I haven't encountered. Likely because they aren't being obnoxious :)

I mean, ham should be entering a renaissance and full of awesomeness doing hobbyist SDR and IoT things but there's so many people stuck firmly in the past...

I give the average ham emergency-response person 10 out of 10 points for motivation and enthusiasm, unfortunately, in the modern era IP and packet based emergency communications systems are increasingly much more important than half duplex analog radio channels. They are also seriously hampered by finances - ham projects are a labor of love for the mostly age 45+ males who are the vast majority of the community. I didn't mean to be dismissive or insulting by calling them greybeards, but if you google "ham radio shack" and look at the pictures of people about 9 out of 10 of the people who are seriously into the hobby are older white men who fit a particular demographic niche. It's a much less diverse community than the Internet engineering/IP community as a whole. Not that a NANOG or APNIC meeting has a great deal of female gender representation or ethnic minorities, but the demographic skews a great deal younger.

Regarding the finances - projects funded out of peoples' pockets and small funding sources won't be able to build the sort of serious five to six nines reliability networks with significant N+1 redundancy that will survive a major disaster. The amount of money that has been thrown around via the US DHS to local agencies in the past 14 years is immense. Similarly, large ISPs and major telecoms and their infrastructure providers (major IX points, datacenters, colos) have put a metric shitload of money into being able to survive a major disaster. Look at the engineering of the NAP of the Americas in Miami, for instance. In a major disaster I know of at least a dozen ISPs that might lose 75% of their network, towards the edges, as sites run out of battery and generator and fall of the network, but the remaining 25% of the network including their core will remain online for multi-week periods with fun things like 50,000 liter diesel tanks and N+1 2 megawatt generators. The telecom industry has a long tradition of seriously overbuilding stuff to survive disasters.

In a serious disaster, small transportable first responder command posts and similar need access to services that can only be delivered over reasonably-close-to-broadband IP services: GIS mapping, sending/receiving photos and schematics, logistics manifests, VoIP with 0.0% packet loss, medical data and a myriad of other things that you can't do by half duplex voice alone.

Hi walrus01, thanks for the reality check, and the detailing into the various present-day approaches for comms. I certainly have a lot of reading to do now :)

I do believe there are many situations where Amateur Radio can help during disaster scenarios since not all places have these IP networks that you're pointing us to. There are lots of real stories, as recent as last year, where HAMs went out of their way to help during local crisis. See the Chennai floods last year, for instance. I have many more such stories from India at least.

Amateur Radio is within the reach of the average citizen. One doesn't need expensive equipment, or connections with the Defense, or lots of money. I've attended camps where we learned to put together antennae for under a dollar, which gave us a range of about 300 kms. I've seen simple radios put together which permitted VHF and UHF communications. I don't have a license in the part of the world I'm in at the moment, but in the US, I've spent time with HAMs who are active on CW - transmitting Morse code all over.

While it is certainly true that ISPs would have lots of fuel, and that most repeaters are powered from the regular electrical grid, I believe these are opportunities for like-minded HAMs to put together something that is independent of regular power grids. e.g. Solar and wind powered Repeater stations, spare equipment wrapped up in Faraday Cages, and lots of people getting licenses to become Amateur Radio operators.

There's also a lot to be said for having the gear to be able to coordinate with friends/family until normal comms are restored for non-responders.

Just because you aren't coordinate the "real" help doesn't mean having your own communications in the short term won't be handy.

The demographics almost precisely match the classic car hobby or woodworking in that if you buy a $200 graphics card 5 years ago, today you have a paperweight sitting in a landfill and your net worth is $200 lower. Therefore "computer people" are somewhat egalitarian, a 65+ white guy probably spent the same amount of money on his macbook as a 22 year old black woman.

Ham radio or classic cars or woodworking are different. You can safely assume an old guy will have a fabulous workshop in the years before death. I inherited a nice 1960s craftsman drill press and it works perfectly and looks stylish in a retro manner and when I'm 65 people will be subject to google image search pix of my shop. No 25 year old kid is proud of his workshop unless he's trust fund rich or there's a weird back story. My electronics lab is about the same as is my ham radio gear.

There is also a side dish of all computer people are noobs, almost all of them, who will leave the field in a couple years either fed up or ageism'd out or they were only in it for the $$$ or maybe its just a hobby that doesn't appeal to most people for more than five or so years. Whereas you have hams or woodworkers or car nuts who've been into one hobby from age 12 till 82 and 70 years of growth in skill and equipment will result in some impressive internet pix of some 82 yr old dude's shop.

Likewise if selection pressures mean you're only going to see old peoples workshops, the demographics are going to look very much like a college EE class from say 1965, because that's who's workshop you're looking at. Its highly likely that in 50 years you'll see old people workshops online that match the gender and racial demographics of the MSEE graduating class of 2016, but you're going to have to wait 50 years to see todays freshly minted MSEE's as old people.

Finally I'll admit my workshop is not terribly well organized, or could be improved, and there's that selection pressure that I'm not going to post a pix of my table saw with pieces of wood stacked on the table or sawdust shavings all over my router table. What you see online is staged and unusual and artificial, much as very few houses in the real world look like the pix in a "Better Homes and Gardens" magazine. And that staging taking piles of cash and time mean you're mostly seeing old people stuff. Even if most of the world in reality isn't old people stuff, most of the pictures certainly are.

Ah yes, "whackers" http://nt1k.com/blog/2012/emcomm-and-whackers/

The ham radio version of the mall ninja!

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mall_ninja

I wish the ARRL would stop pushing EmComm to the exclusion of anything else.

Relevant short story: "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth"

http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked...

The best short story I've ever read. Hands down.

VHF LoS (Line of Sight) would work over a distance of about 65 miles (curvature of the earth) and HF/SW pretty much world-wide, I suppose?

In the real world, dealing with handheld and vehicle mounted VHF/UHF transmitters in the 2.5, 5 and 10W transmit power range, having local repeaters in high places like mountaintops or on top of 200m tall office buildings is extremely necessary for that repeater to cover even 1/20th of the land area of a western US state (WA, OR size).

I was referring to stand-alone stations - as in those with a simple GP antenna (VHF) and a half-wave dipole (HF), where there are no repeaters or other external devices involved.

Yup, also satellites are a limited resource where as ham is completely decentralized.

In 5 minutes I can setup my D710 as a cross-band repeater to a VHF <-> UHF allowing anyone who has a $35 Baofeng within ~7mi of me to cover over ~100mi area. Sure sat phones are great but they aren't nearly as good for local communication.