Hearing Voices: 9/11 and the Ham Radio Renaissance

As the world remembers and pays tribute to the nearly 3000 victims of the September 11 terrorists attacks a decade ago, I thought I would reference this article from 2003 on how 9/11 brought a "renaissance" to ham radio:

...Sept. 11, 2001, marked a quiet renaissance in the world of amateur radio, after years of declining membership and relative obscurity. Over the past couple of decades, amateur radio operators have witnessed their beloved pastime lose much of its luster. In the early part of the 20th century, hams, as amateur radio operators are also known, were a rogue band of technology buffs who were quick to pick up on Guglielmo Marconi's experiments with then-new wireless technology. They for the most part defied government regulation of the airwaves until World War I, when the U.S. Navy shut down all non-military radio operations.

The full article can be found here.

IL neighbors up in arms over ham radio towers

A ham radio operator in Peoria County has some residents outraged.

Craig Thompson is building several towers on his property and his neighbors are apparently concerned with the view once they have been erected:

Furthermore in the comments section, one neighbor has threatened to install an electric dog fence or resort to other means to impede the use of the towers.

The funny thing is, everything Mr. Thompson has done to this point has been legal, cleared by the county, and it's on his personal property. The county trustee even cited amateur radio's federal guidelines (PRB-1) that allow ham radio to supercede tower restrictions.

"New" web site address

You can now get to my blog by using the domain http://www.khaos.net.

This was a domain I registered a few years ago when it became available. The original intent didn't pan out but I kept the domain name anyway.

I wanted to start up a high-altitude ballooning group using an acronym and came up with "Knoxville High-Altitude Operation System" or "Observation" instead of "Operating". Somethinglikethat...

This was actually a couple of years before UTARC's guys started up their ARHAB efforts and I joined up with them instead.

Hmm, maybe now it can stand for "K4HSM's Ham (Amateur) Operator Service"?

k4hsm.blogspot.com still works as well.

Not the best title for a ham radio article...

The Daily O'Collegian of Oklahoma State University has a nice write-up about ham radio in their recent issue.

Not too thrilled about the title, tho...

10-4 Good Buddy

Oklahoma State University’s Amateur Radio Club is making a comeback.

Having been around since the 1920s, Amateur Radio Club is one of the oldest clubs on campus.

But just two years ago, the club’s outlook was bleak.

With only one member, who was a senior and about to graduate, the club was seemingly coming to an end.

But Seth Charles, now ARC president, Patrick Huber and Logan Cabori helped start it back up.

More on this article here.

I would hope someone would have corrected the writer prior to publication, but I guess you can't win them all.

Mt. Pleasant, WI is not kind to ham radio

If you're a ham operator, or the father of one, and you or a member of your family have special needs, stay away from Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin.

The town's planning commission ordered that a tower belonging to the Markstrom family was to be taken down after it was determined that the Markstroms did not secure the proper permits to erect it.

But it's not so much the planning commission, as it is the neighbors who all of a sudden claim that the tower's interfering with their TVs. The complaints were brought on after Jim (KB9MMA) and his son Samm (KC9POP) had their community service during severe weather attract unwanted attention by local officials and neighbors. Samm is 10 and has issues with Cerebral Palsy.

Granted, I don't live there, and I'm certainly biased when it comes to ham radio towers and the right to have one (I will NEVER live in an HOA thanks to their micro-plutocracies that base their "laws" on the almighty $$$ at the expense of individuality and the freedom of expression) but when the neighbors call a ten-year old a "media puppet" and are indifferent to the public service he's been awarded, the negative attention given to the neighbors is warranted in my opinion.

It looks like several media outlets have reported the story and there's even a facebook page dedicated to the cause.

However, now that the commission has spoken, it looks to be a lost cause. Jim has said he may sue to keep the tower, but at this point, why bother? Get the hell out of there, and move to a place that has wide open spaces, and welcomes the community service that Samm employs in order to get out of his shell that his disability has encased him.

And if Mt. Pleasant, God forbid, gets hit with a tornado, I would certainly hope they have ample warning. They would, if they'd allow one ham and his son to keep their tower.

You never know who's listening...

Last Saturday night, before this whole brouhaha with K8JSM stirred up a hornet's nest, I did something I wasn't sure I'd ever be doing again - participate in a SKYWARN net.

My friend Jason was recently appointed the coordinator for the area and this was to be his first real test in that role. He was used to it, though, since he and I would team up with a couple of others and run the nets years ago. When a new coordinator was named, all he would do is call Jason or another friend of mine, Tom, and get them to run the nets. So they were used to the pressure. I decided to listen in and help, because that's what friends do for one another...

The weather system that moved through had already killed 10 people in Mississippi and was bearing down on East Tennessee.

The National Weather Service (NWS) had been sending out messages warning people about the severity of the system 48 hours beforehand. The last time I recall the NWS being that cautious was when a tornado tore through Mossy Grove several years before. However, by the time it arrived around midnight Saturday night/Sunday morning, it lost most of its energy and was scattered storms.

It still managed to put an E-F2 tornado in Greenback, just southeast of where I live.

As that tornado was touching down, one local TV station was on the air broadcasting the storm's approach to Knoxville.

As I tuned in to the net, several people were checking in and reporting the usual - heavy winds, lotsa lightning, nothing happening, my bunions are killing me...the typical stuff we'd normally get.

But then, one ham who was doing an overnight paper route called in to report he was in contact with another delivery person who "saw a tornado" in Greenback.

In the past, I usually shunned this type of 3rd party reporting. I recall one such net where we spent 15 minutes scrambling to get confirmation because someone heard on a police scanner that the fire department was reporting a tornado down in Anderson County near Oak Ridge, and it set off a panic. That report ended up being discounted, but it tied up our net as we struggled to get some sort of visual confirmation from those listening, many of whom ran to their police scanners to listen for the report from the fire department.

But something was different about this report. I knew the guy reporting it and he wouldn't just throw a report out like this without some sort of credible evidence (he and Jason are close friends and I'm sure Jason lectured him about it a dozen times over). Dwight (the ham reporting) made sure to preface his report and said "I'm getting this '3rd party', but another driver just told me he saw a tornado in the Greenback community."

So, I decided I was going to run upstairs into the living room and see what the meteorologists were reporting on TV.

No sooner than I step out of the radio room do I hear one of the two meteorologists on TV exclaim: "And we've just received CONFIRMATION of a tornado in Greenback, this is by AMATEUR RADIO..."

I about had a heart attack.

My first reaction was "what weather net are they listening to?" and I scrambled back to the radio to start scanning for other nets (none were taking place other than in northern Georgia and middle Tennessee) and I quickly grabbed the mic and told Jason to "call me immediately" so that I could let him know the TV station was listening, and possibly erroneously reporting a touchdown. No sooner did I un-key the mic when another ham piped in that the TV station was listening and reporting the tornado touching down.

Well now that the cat was out of the bag, we (as in all of us on the net) had to spend 5+ minutes doing damage control, stating repeatedly that the report was 3rd party, unconfirmed, and that we were working to get visual sighting of damage or of the tornado.

Suddenly other hams start reporting that they're getting reports of ambulance and fire dispatches to homes damaged by tornados and other emergencies. The hams were using specific addresses, and that was always a big no-no when I was calling the nets.

Eventually, the TV station corrected their report, but did mention reports of emergency dispatches were being sent to the same addresses we were hearing, indicating something happened out in Greenback.

Eventually, it came to pass that there was indeed a tornado in Greenback, but the rule of thumb we always employed was not to confirm what we ourselves didn't see.

Dwight didn't do anything wrong, because he did preface that he was getting the information 3rd-hand. However, the TV station was either rushing to get the story out on the air or was not entirely hearing the report by Dwight, and assumed that the tornado was confirmed.

Technically speaking, we couldn't confirm if a tornado did touchdown (that's the NWS's job when they do damage surveys after the fact) but the last thing I want to see is SKYWARN in East Tennessee getting discredited because we're hollering "TORNADO!" when in fact it's not been confirmed, or just something we hear elsewhere.

It's been a couple years since I was involved in SKYWARN. It's gonna take a little bit of time to get used to things again. Getting things back on track is going to have to be priority one, but getting the media on track with what we do is apparently another priority entirely.