[Fourlanders] What motorola says about ham radio

[Jim Worsham]

Unfortunately, I am sure that guy was saying exactly what the Motorola
corporate guys told him to say.  Take my word for it, you don't give a quote
to the WSJ without clearing it through corporate PR.  Remember how Motorola
makes money.  They have convinced countless city, county and state
goverments to spend Billions of $ on their latest and greatest stuff.  I am
certain that they told all those government officials that it would survive
anything.  It now lies in ruins.  The double whammy is that they will now
make all those Billions of $ again replacing it all.  I didn't think the
article as a whole was all that positive.  Comments like "clunky,
outdated-looking radio" and "technology has changed little since World War
II" don't seem all that great to me but maybe I am just being sensitive.

73
Jim W4KXY

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Subject: [Fourlanders] What motorola says about ham radio


 Here is the text of an article published in the Wall Street Journal. 
Except
 for the last paragraph with the statement made by an employee of Motorola,
it clearly applauds the efforts of the volunteer ham radio operators.

 I think it interesting for a "professional" and an apparent employee of
Motorola to make such statement.  Perhaps his management will take a serious
look at is continued tenure with Motorola.


  HURRICANE KATRINA

 As Telecom Reels
  From Storm Damage,
 Ham Radios Hum

 By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS
 Staff 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 outdated-looking radio.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 had 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 had 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 jabbering 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?"

 Write to Christopher Rhoads at christopher.rhoads at wsj.com
 <mailto:christopher.rhoads at wsj.com>


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