{"id":2338,"date":"2010-02-07T05:32:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-06T18:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2010\/02\/07\/haiti-dominican-hams-help\/"},"modified":"2010-02-07T05:32:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-06T18:32:00","slug":"haiti-dominican-hams-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2010\/02\/07\/haiti-dominican-hams-help\/","title":{"rendered":"Haiti: Dominican Hams Help"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The video (from a phone patch the day after the quake) gives you a real sense of how bad it is. It was good to see that hams from the Dominican Republic were going over to help out. See below.<\/p>\n

From: http:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/telecom\/wireless\/hams-in-haiti\/1 <\/a>
BY<\/b> Anne-Marie Corley \/\/ January 2010 <\/p>\n

… Which leads to the other difference in Haiti: The country is home to very few amateur operators in the first place. Though there are around 100 to 120 ham licenses active for Haiti, according to Pitts, only about seven or eight operators were actually in Haiti as far as the ARRL can determine. According to Bill Pasternak, the president and cofounder of the Amateur Radio Newsline<\/a>, which broadcast audio from one ham operator outside Port-au-Prince soon after the earthquake hit, most of the operators who have Haitian licenses aren\u2019t even Haitian but rather missionaries and aid workers who travel in and out of the country.
Pitts says that the ARRL has heard from only a few operators, most from outside Port-au-Prince, though one operator did radio in from the city just to let the organization know he was alive. \u201dThe ones that were there did all they could,\u201d Pitts says, \u201dbut we haven\u2019t heard from all of them.\u201d It is likely that some were killed, Pitts speculates. Others may have been concerned with safety, McPherson suggests, so hams in Haiti have been \u201don and off the air,\u201d he says.
To help out, hams from the neighboring Dominican Republic have traveled into Haiti several times to set up equipment, despite being attacked by looters last week. They set up a 2-meter analog repeater high on a mountain close to the Haiti\u2013Dominican Republic border. The repeater takes in weak signals\u2014even one from a clip-on radio putting out just 5 watts\u2014and rebroadcasts those signals on a different frequency and at a higher power.
Dominican operators installed a second repeater near the airport in Port-au-Prince and were expecting a third to arrive from ARRL Tuesday, which they will likely put in the region southeast of the capital.<\/p>\n

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\u201dThey\u2019re doing really good work,\u201d Pitts says of the Dominican helpers, \u201dgetting things where they need to be and coordinating with other teams.\u201d
Pitts adds that the international nature of ham radio is well suited to emergency missions like this one. Hams in Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Florida, and Puerto Rico, among others, were on the air and listening for any signals soon after the earthquake. \u201dNobody was going to hiccup without being noticed,\u201d Pitts says. And because they talk in radio code, language barriers don\u2019t matter as much. \u201dWe all have the same language,\u201d Pitts says. \u201dWe\u2019re used to talking with each other.\u201d
The embedded hams in Salvation Army recovery teams work, too, McPherson says, because they can tap into the entire amateur radio community. Nonofficial operators, for example, who may hear an embed trying to reach Haiti or to call out, may help relay a signal. \u201dIt\u2019s like [all the] amateur community is listening, standing by to help,\u201d McPherson says.
The lesson to be learned, according to Pitts, is that \u201din a situation or population where amateur radio is encouraged and present,\u201d hams can provide better and faster information during a major disaster, which allows a faster response. \u201dThat golden 48 hours is where the hams really can shine, if they\u2019re there.\u201d
So while cellular and Internet communication return ever so slowly to normal (or better than normal), what Haiti might also want to invest in is a few more homegrown radio operators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The video (from a phone patch the day after the quake) gives you a real sense of how bad it is. It was good to see that hams from the Dominican Republic were going over to help out. See below. From: http:\/\/spectrum.ieee.org\/telecom\/wireless\/hams-in-haiti\/1 BY Anne-Marie Corley \/\/ January 2010 … Which leads to the other difference … Continue reading “Haiti: Dominican Hams Help”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,351],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dominican-republic","category-haiti"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}