Christopher Moore writes:
>For many hams, the emergency service aspects provide them with a sense of
>purpose.  Living here in the U.S with our plethora of communications
>services, cell phones and internet caffees, the value of traffic nets,
>emergency stations and the like needs to be questioned.

        We should always question what we are doing and whether it is
effective, but one observation about all those cell phones and
Internet hookups is that they tend to stop working when the going gets
extremely tough.  In Oklahoma City in 1995, New York City in 2001 and
London, the cell phone networks melted down within minutes of the
disasters.  Not because the equipment was destroyed or hackers
vandalized the infrastructure, but due to the fact that telephone
networks are built around the idea that only 10 to 15 percent of the
possible telephone users are going to be on the line at any given
time.  With cell phones, there are only so many channels and as soon
as they fill up, that's it.  The same is true with ordinary land line
telephones since telephone switching offices are again only designed
to have enough capacity to support 10 to 20 percent of the subscribers
getting on the phone at any one time.

        When the day is sunny, nobody is doing anything particularly
nasty and all is well, you don't need the hams at all.  You don't need
roofing companies or Winter coats or antifreeze in your car.  Life is
good.  The hams are needed when the normal routine breaks down for
whatever reason so the hard part is being ready when it doesn't seem
like much can go wrong.

        The tsunami and all those man-made calamities tell us that
things can go from perfect to rotten in a split second and that's when
we as well as professional emergency services are needed.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group