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Message: <blockquote data-quote="( deleted account )" data-source="post: 218922" data-attributes="member: 5993">Yes, surprisingly lots of public service.  When hurricanes or tornadoes hit, cell towers and communication towers go down quickly or are flooded with calls making what cell access remaining useless.  Terrorism, like 911 resulted in hundreds of well trained radio operators, setting up portable repeaters and transceivers passing radio traffic amount a lot of agencies. These guys worked for MONTHS post 911 and Katrina and other disasters.  Forest fires, volcanoes ( several hams killed at Mt Helens) lots of search and rescue, skywarn, etc.  With internet taking over a lot of long haul sruff like military families on Skype for instance, and phone patches into remote areas, ( used to relay newborn. Ultrasounds from northern Quebec) more local emergency communication hasn’t slowed much due to ready availability of trained operators with immediate access to thousands of mobile stations and ability to set up portable stuff on a moments notice.then there's the hobby and learning/ educational aspect.  Clubs, schools, universities, etc.  All started with Marconi, Edison and Samuel Morse and then lay people got interested, building first spark gap generators, then whiskey bottle sized  vacuum tube equipment and developed more modern from there. Heck, even when I started tinkering in radio, it was all vacuum tubes, from shot glass to beer bottle sized, or a lot of conversion of WW2 surplus. Now all solid state stuff, huge capabilities on novel sized packages. Hams no longer claim any leads in much development of electronic equipment except for antenna development.  heck, now hams have over 35 active satellites used by any hams all over the world.  The first one in the 70’s was called OSCAR - orbiting satellite carrying amateur radio.  It was a LEO bird, and now we have many geostationary ones as well. All financed by donations by hams, but put there as a service by many commercial rocket companies.  A whole new world from old Samuel Morse.  And lots of high powered moon bounce radio wave experimentation. I could go on and on, but the bad news......ham radio is waning....especially kids nowadays not interested much, sooner play their video games, other interests.  Internet and cell phones have sure lessened repeater Activity, but they are still there to help in some disaster. peurto Rico is abuzz with ham radio volunteers still a year? After the hurricane.  I keep thinking I should pack up some equipment and head down there. Pack my SCUBA equipment, too! Heh!  But walleyes are biting and hunting season is approaching........nuff said....</blockquote>

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