I began this post expecting to chastise the leadership of the MicroHAMS Amateur Radio Club for going past the last reasonable moment for posting information about this Saturday's virtual MicroHAMS 2021 Digital Conference (MHDC). I haven't posted about this favorite event until now as there simply wasn't anything to report, except the date. I had "side" information that the conference would in fact be held, and there was active planning underway for some interesting speakers, but nothing publicly disclosed. But, as I browsed to the MHDC website tonight, to write this post, lo and behold, there was (finally) an update, posted today.
Really, MicroHAMS leadership... this great conference (and the great speakers you've scheduled) deserves better than an announcement posted literally a few days before the actual conference. Not to mention, not even mentioning the actual date of the conference (just the hint of "see you Saturday") or the actual URL for viewing MHDC 2021.
Reproduced in whole below, because at this late date, they need all the publicity they can get.
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MicroHAMS Digital Conference 2021 – Update
Since 2007 the Microsoft Amateur Radio Club (MicroHAMS) has held a conference focusing on digital communications: the MicroHAMS Digital Conference (MHDC). The mission of the MDHC conference is to “inspire, inform and educate.” As such, the MHDC presenters offer a variety of topics across a wide range of skill levels.
One of the virtues of going online is that we can invite presenters that would be impractical to bring to the Seattle area. This year, half of our presenters are from outside our area. The latest updates will be published on the MicroHAMS web site at http://www.microhams.com/mhdc/.
This year’s conference will feature the following –
Walter Holmes, K5WH – Free DV Digital Voice for HF
Gregg Marco, W6IZT – Rig in a Box solution for DXpeditions
Bob Bruninga, WB4APR – The APRS author will discuss the latest developments
Paul Elliott, WB6CXC – Developing and tracking drift buoys
Paul Sturmer, KI7WLV – High speed communications from HuskySat-1
Bryan Hoyer, K7UDR – The ultimate packet workstation
Now in our 14th year, we are repeating the online format from last year’s event. The 2021 conference will be streamed to YouTube and at no charge (donations welcome). One of the virtues of going online is that we can invite presenters that would be impractical to bring to the Seattle area and support an unlimited number of attendees. In 2021, half of our presenters are from outside the Pacific Northwest.
During the conference, there are two ways that attendees can interact with our presenters. Attendees can ask questions in the YouTube chat channel, which we will pass on to the presenters during Q&A. For live Q&A, each session has a Zoom breakout room available at the end of the session. Presenters and attendees can hang out and answer questions in person for the hour after their session has aired. The entire conference will also be recorded and available on YouTube for viewing later.
See you Saturday!
Scott Honaker, N7SS for the MHDC Team
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This is one of my favorite conferences of the year. Recommended! This is one of the few virtual events that I make time to attend "live" (though I intend to watch it on iPad in my shop, doing various Amateur Radio activities).
Thanks for reading!
Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Bellingham, Washington, USA
2021-04-19
Communications Academy 2021
A bit of background; through 2019, Communications Academy was a weekend event held at a community college in the Seattle area. It was a unique event that brought together first responders and emergency managers and often US government (such as Federal Emergency Management Agency - FEMA, National Weather Service - NWS, etc.) personnel and Amateur Radio operators who are, or who were, involved in Amateur Radio emergency communications. It was a good event, with ample value created just in the cross-fertilization and the education opportunities. One of the nicer bonuses of attending Comm Academy was the Saturday "show and tell" tours of various agencies' emergency communications vehicles. (The FEMA vehicles were particularly impressive.)
Communications Academy 2020 was going to be another in-person event until the outbreak of COVID-19 (which began in the US in nearby Kirkland, Washington) made that impossible. At that late date, it was impossible to put together a virtual version of Comm Academy, so it was simply canceled. Everyone understood.
Apparently, the Comm Academy principals (not listed on the website, though they were disclosed in the videos) decided not just to put on a virtual analog of in-person Comm Academy, but make Comm Academy into a virtual-first event with high quality production values and ample support for the virtual aspects, such as emcees, multiple people scanning the various live feedback channels for questions. Comm Academy's principals succeeded - Comm Academy 2021 was a stellar event, watched by thousands worldwide, instead of the few hundreds that attended the in-person version from around the Pacific Northwest and a few from outside the region.
I can't say enough good things about the production quality (and overall quality) of Comm Academy 2021 - see for yourself on YouTube.
I'll disclose that I only "attended" (watched) a few of the presentations live, mostly because weekends are precious time at home given a hectic travel schedule at the moment, and knowing that all the presentations would be archived for later viewing. I'll be watching all the presentations (except one - see below) later this week.
The two presentations I made time for were both people I knew, and presentations I've already heard in other conferences. I made time to watch these two presentations because I knew that the presenters would provide good information and they represent a realistic perspective of Amateur Radio emergency communications in 2021. I was curious how they would tailor their presentations for the Comm Academy 2021 audience, and they didn't dissapoint.
The first presentation I watched was Winlink, Digital Voice and Tech Based Comms - When Infrastructure Fails by Scott Currie NS7C. Currie discussed how much "infrastructure" has crept into Amateur Radio systems that are intended to be used for emergency communications. Currie is one of the few that explains from authority that just because you decide to put a Winlink node from your home (or other locations), if that node is dependent solely on commercial power and typical Internet access (cable modem, DSL, etc.), and does not have access to backup power and "hardened" Internet access, then it's unlikely to remain online and accessible during a widespread emergency (when Winlink will be needed most). Currie also pointed out that the extensive networking of repeaters (especially Digital Mobile Radio - DMR) repeaters is also a vulnerability. Even if the repeater is connected to Internet via a "hardened" Internet connection such as HamWAN (common here in the Pacific Northwest), the DMR controllers (C-Bridges) are installed in commercial data centers. The likelyhood of those Internet connections remaining intact are not high given the hazards here in the Pacific Northwest - tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even cyber attacks (not to mention the remote possibility of the many military installations in the Pacific Northwest being targeted for attack.) But I digress. Currie also dived a bit deeper and pointed out that repeaters are potentially vulnerable infrastructure - they need reliable power, occasional maintenance (winters on mountaintops can be severe for tower-mounted antennas). Thus repeaters (not just the remote linking) also can fail when you need them the most.
Currie then encouraged us to get familiar with the peer-to-peer networking capabilities of Winlink - not just connecting directly between Winlink nodes, but also how to make use of the store-and-forward capabilities of Winlink. That was excellent food for thought. Setting up Winlink (as a client) is on my shack to-do list for the summer.
(Brief aside about Winlink's role in Amateur Radio and Emergency Communications. Winlink for better, or worse (by far the better, but it has some issues) has become the standard system for emergency data communications. By far it has the biggest user base, the most robust infrastructure, and the best mindshare of all the myriad methods of data communications in Amateur Radio. If you're going to participate in Amateur Radio Emergency Communications, you have to be familiar and comfortable with and able to communicate using with Winlink.)
Overall, Currie's presentation was excellent. As he admits, he's been presenting on these topics for a long time, and it shows - he's a subject matter expert on these topics. My only wish is that Currie had his own Internet presence for reference to his presentations and other materials for easier reference than parsing through his many presentations that are available online.
The second presentation I watched realtime was Emergency Wireless Internet following the Holiday Farm Fire by Randy Neals W3RWN. This presentation is remarkable and compelling precisely because it doesn't involve Amateur Radio (well, only very peripherally). In the wake of a major fire in Oregon during Fall 2020, several small central Oregon communities were left with essentially no Internet and no telephone service because their sole telecommunications connection was fiber cables on poles up a long, winding road through a forest which had experienced extensive wildfires, and the fiber cables, nor the poles, and some infrastructure (like a remote central office) did not survive. Although "cells on wheels" were quickly dispatched, they were only on site for a short time, and the communities were left with essentially no communications. Neals was part of a small band of Internet professionals that became aware of this situation and thought "maybe we can do something". They pulled off a feat of telecommunications engineering that the telecom infrastructure providers were unable... mostly unwilling... to do and knitted together microwave links and other methods to allow these communities some Internet connectivity. It's inspiring to hear about what they did.
It's sobering to know that despite these communities experiencing a "telecommunications emergency", there's nothing within conventional Amateur Radio could have done to help this situation. Voice communications via HF or VHF/UHF repeaters wouldn't have helped. Winlink wouldn't have helped. Even setting up "Amateur Radio microwave" networks like HamWAN or AREDN wouldn't have helped because of the prohibitions on commercial use and encryption on those systems. What worked was just using license-exempt wireless links and a lot of knowledge about current telecommunications systems. These are a completely different type emergency communicators. This is a "we really better pay attention to this story" moment for Amateur Radio and their perceived role in emergency communications.
It's also instructive that "Oregon Internet Response" was essentially a made-up name for this ad-hoc group. Even now they still haven't formally organized, apparently because what they did is, at the moment, a one-off that could only come together that time with those individuals. To make any progress, they had to call themselves something to get in touch with various entities. Though this is entirely my imagination, I could guess that there's a marked difference in effectiveness between:
"I'm Randy Neals and I'm a Ham Radio operator trying to help restore communications to..." <click> goes the other end.
and
"I'm Randy Neals with Oregon Internet Response and we're trying to restore communications to several communities in Oregon." "Yes, Mr. Neals, how can we help?".
In explaining the story of "Oregon Internet Response" I'm not positing that OIR did something unprecedented - it's not. There have been other groups over the years that have provided "Emergency Internet" including a group of Wireless Internet Service Providers that helped restore Internet access after Hurricane Katrina.
Neals' presentation was also excellent. What I took away from Neal's presentation is to provide useful emergency communications in 2021 and beyond, that Amateur Radio needs to radically broaden its scope of what types of communications it's prepared to help with.
A small postscript to Neal's presentation. Two members of Neals' team that previously were not Amateur Radio operators, now are. They found Amateur Radio useful enough (again, Amateur Radio was used by Neals' team, but only peripherally) to become an Amateur Radio operator.
Bookending these two great presentations was another presentation that I won't link to. This presenter was tiredly reading a laundry list of "Amateur Radio served agencies" and specifically mentioned the American Red Cross as a "served agency". Apparently he was unaware that that in October, 2020 Alex R. Dieffenbach, CEO of the American Red Cross Northwest Region, had served notice that Amateur Radio operators directly serving the American Red Cross chapters in their Northwest Region "...that HAM radio will no longer be part of our communication strategy." (That's a direct quote.) This presenter then went on to read a laundry list of various modes that are in use in Amateur Radio that could be of use for emergency communications. Included in that list were AM (Amplitude Modulation) and CW (Continuous Wave... aka Morse Code). As far as I'm concerned, that total lack of real world perspective invalidated that guy's entire presentation. If he thinks that CW has any conceivable usefulness in a real emergency...
The contrast between "unliked presenter" and the Currie and Neals presentations couldn't be more stark. The "unlinked presenter" is, from my experience, more the norm for "Amateur Radio Emergency Communications". Show up with a radio and a license and expect to be given a commensurate task. But what happens in the real world is likely to be something like:
Emergency Coordinator: "You're a ham. Could you send this spreadsheet to FEMA HQ in DC?"
Ham: "Um, I can't right now, the bands aren't right / the Winlink gateway is down / the file is too big."
Emergency Coordinator: "Sigh. OK. Well, since you're here anyway, maybe you could make some coffee?"
We gotta fix that.
Thanks for reading!
Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Bellingham, Washington, USA
2021-04-12
Posted by Steve Stroh on April 12, 2021 at 10:31 AM in Emergency Communications, Gatherings of Note, General Commentary, Growing Amateur Radio, Presentations / Talks | Permalink