I agree!
Transmit what, and to whom? What kind of license?
There are no Long Wave stations in North America.
They would also need to give people a way of acquiring suitable radios.
Requesting or relaying emergency information and requesting assistance from other radio operators or first responders if needed, and probably with an amateur radio license of some sort.
Right. But we do have Medium Wave and Short Wave.
It probably wouldn't be too costly or difficult to subsidize cheap but adequate windup AM/FM radios at a minimum. I think some municipal governments already do something like that in the form of emergency preparedness kits, but I haven't checked, so not sure.
The challenge of getting that third of the population that now has no radio at all to get one and keep it with batteries and available is huge. Many do not know what AM is, and nearly all have no idea what short wave is at all.
If you're relying on radio broadcasters for emergency information, you're likely going to be disappointed. If all the utilities you list are down, there's no way for the broadcaster to retrieve up-to-date information to share on the air.
Shortwave licensees are prohibited by law from targeting an audience in the United States.
I'm guessing that cc333 would be thinking that this would be authorized and established purely for emergency purposes and administered by government entities.
The poster wrote "probably with an amateur radio license of some sort." Hams can communicate with any other licensee, anywhere. But what they cannot do legally is broadcast.
Here in AZ amateur radio ('hams') do it every fire season. Road closures, escape routes, fire progress, evacuation orders etc.
Not on a national level, anyway. There was talk of activating it on 9/11, but ultimately they decided not to since there was wall-to-wall coverage on virtually every radio and TV network, and they felt that as a result any EAS alerts would've been redundant.
Yeah, that'll never happen....
That's useful! I'm sure they do something similar here in CA, but I've never listened in to find out (I'd been too busy evacuating to bother for the most part, though I wish I had thought of it earlier, as it would've been much more useful than the lousy excuse of an emergency information source Facebook is).
I need to learn some Morse Code. It's not hard I'm sure, I just have to take the time to do it.
As a holder of an amateur radio license, I can tell you, "Not anymore." It's a great skill to have, but it's not required.
Exactly. And who listens to the federal government anymore?
Yeah, but saying that, wasn't there an issue a few years ago where the nationwide power grid which is networked to a certain extent and is supposed to "self-heal" get a spike or overvoltage somewhere and it caused a domino effect that caused real headaches with the power systems in several states?
I believe this is the blackout I was thinking of - it occurred in 2003 and for those who find the article below (or others like it) to be tl;dr, there was a software glitch that occurred after high-voltage power lines came into contact with some trees. Rather than a localized power outage, it spread to kill power to up to 55 million (depending on the source quoted, the article below says 50) in parts of 8 states and sections of Ontario, Canada. Though most had power restored within hours, some were affected for up to 4 days and it's blamed for as many as 100 deaths (the article below says only 11) and billions of $$ in damages. From everything I've quickly read, they obviously did several studies and implimented several "lessons learned" which were then shared with other power utilities.
Not any more, at least entry level
Oops. I overlooked the word "amateur".
