HRN 535: HEL(L)ENE 🌀

Hurricane Helene 🌀 left a lot of destruction in its wake, especially in western North Carolina. Power, phone and internet were down over a wide area. So, ham radio stepped into the gap, right?

Sort of. HamRadioNow send requests for participation in our Sunday live show to statewide ARES officers in Northern Florida, Georgia, South and North Caroliona, with narry a peep in response.

Instead, we monitored some ad-hoc nets that sprung up on 40 meters and on a wide coverage 2 Meter repeater in the NC Mountains, carring mostly inbound welfare requests that mostly couldn’t be delivered because… well, who was going to deliver them? These nets had no local infrastructure or a cadre of hams who might be able to pick their way around roads closed by flooding and debris to find the people who relatives so desperately were trying to reach. But yet the nets persisted, hour after hour.

We did listen to a 75 Meter NC traffic net that actually passed an outbound message - the way it should be, except for how long it takes to send this kind of traffic by voice. So David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ discuss the efficiency of sending this traffic as data… which they admit may well be going on, but who could tell? Another problem.

Gary’s griping may not be popular – there’s much back-patting and self-contratulating over this activity. And it may have actually gotten a few messages through… hard to tell. This, while any more official activity took place in shadows.