This is kind of a goofy discussion...people like what people like; I drive to the airport every morning and talk on the 2 or 70 m/cm machine to people who I could conference in on a cell call...but we enjoy it.
As for repeaters holding up. when IKE came through Houston the Bay Area repeater (both of them and the APRS machine) turned into a pretty busy communications hub. The cell tower next to us lost power but we had good generator power and had not even started to seriously invade our "potential energy reserve" when the juice came back on. There was a bout 12 hours when both machines were running as hard as they could with traffic.
Robert G. Oler WB5MZO Life member AMSAT ARRL NARS
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2011 18:19:23 -0400 From: [email protected] To: [email protected] CC: [email protected] Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: FM satellites
On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 5:49 PM, Gregg Wonderly [email protected] wrote:
On 7/6/2011 4:30 PM, Bob Bruninga wrote:
In emergency situation novadays a cell-phone is much much better and reliable.
I think there are a lot of people in Haiti that might disagree
Unfortunately, we have a lot of people with ham licenses who have never understood or seen the complexity behind cellular networks to understand how fragile they actually are. Sure, the cell site is wireless to you, but it has power and wired telephony requirements that put it several steps on the risk ladder above a ham repeater, and extremely high risk for failure compared to simplex radio comms.
That's not it at all as I see it. Does anyone on this list really believe when aliens attack that repeaters will survive but cellular networks will all be done?
Network survival is not the pertinent metric; network *recovery* is.
Bob mentioned Haiti. That is a good example. How many active repeaters do you think are in Haiti? How many do you think survived the Earthquake? How many repeaters are in <insert very poor third-world country here>?
The bottom line is setting up an RF station to communicate vital information is an order of magnitude faster than to rely on the cell companies to restore service. That's the issue.
Now tie this to AMSAT-BB:
If I could switch from using a local cell to one based on geosynchronous satellites than RF would probably not be my first option since cell phones offer more forms of communication than a radio (think HT).
-aps (KC2ZSX)
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