I have recently become more aware of and generally interested in electronics and amateur radio, and it got me thinking. What advantage, if any, would there be to having amateur radio experience, over a simple disaster crank radio/flashlight, in the event of a major natural disaster or some other emergency that leads to a longer delay in power being restored? For the sake of argument, let’s assume you have a generator or battery bank to supply your own electricity.
Well, a ham radio transmitter will let you transmit. If you can reach someone else who has power and a ham radio rig, you can get a message to them
A disaster radio will receive. You can receive mass-broadcasted information.
For the vast majority of people out there, I doubt that either is all that critical for most scenarios in 2024.
Internet access basically replaces both of them.
Not to mention broadcast cell alert service, which is available in the US (though not, as I understand, globally).
Just about everyone has a cell phone that has both a radio receiver and transmitter and has global routing already in place, so all that’s necessary to provide communications to pretty much everyone in an area is to get cell coverage up, and provides on-demand information. Getting cell service functioning after a disaster is a priority, and there are trucks with generators and satellite uplinks that get deployed.
So if you’re using AM/FM radio or ham radio, it’s likely just going to be as a backup to that.
There are places where I’d want some kind of voice radio transmitter. If I lived somewhere very remote that didn’t have cell coverage or on a remote island, say, with only a small number of people, where getting cell coverage back up might not be as high a priority, then I think that it’d make a more-reasonable backup. But if you live near civilization, you probably already have stuff that in place that handles the job.
Anyone who has a car probably has a generator-backed AM/FM radio with a large, charged battery anyway, so getting another one is as a backup to that backup.
I’m not convinced on the cell phone thing. Every time there’s even a minor thing around where I am, like a dinky little power outage, everybody grabs their cellphone and my service goes to crap, so much so that when I’ve tried to work through a power outage with my phone, I’ve worked out of my wife’s car after having driven somewhere that does have power.
Also, a standard ham radio uses a lot less power than the entire chain of phone plus network equipment. So, sure, there’s cell tower trucks with generators but a ham rig needs a dinky little solar panel.
FYI: Text sometimes work when calls don’t. Text use much less bandwidth.
Sure… but… not all municipalities let you text 911. And with the way modern phones are being implemented with VoIP+LTE and iMessage/RCS and some of the very exciting failure modes of modern networking… I’m having a very real concern that even if my municipality lets me text 911 (I don’t remember offhand but I think mine does) that if I actually needed to dial 911 under relatively prosaic emergencies like a silly little power outage, I might be out of luck.