[amsat-bb] Re: FM satellites

[Alexander Sack]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 5:49 PM, Gregg Wonderly <greggwon at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/6/2011 4:30 PM, Bob Bruninga wrote:
>>> In emergency situation novadays a cell-phone
>>> is much much better and reliable.
>> I think there are a lot of people in Haiti that might disagree
> Unfortunately, we have a lot of people with ham licenses who have never
> understood or seen the complexity behind cellular networks to understand how
> fragile they actually are.  Sure, the cell site is wireless to you, but it has
> power and wired telephony requirements that put it several steps on the risk
> ladder above a ham repeater, and extremely high risk for failure compared to
> simplex radio comms.

That's not it at all as I see it.  Does anyone on this list really
believe when aliens attack that repeaters will survive but cellular
networks will all be done?

Network survival is not the pertinent metric; network *recovery* is.

Bob mentioned Haiti.  That is a good example.  How many active
repeaters do you think are in Haiti?  How many do you think survived
the Earthquake?   How many repeaters are in <insert very poor
third-world country here>?

The bottom line is setting up an RF station to communicate vital
information is an order of magnitude faster than to rely on the cell
companies to restore service.  That's the issue.

Now tie this to AMSAT-BB:

If I could switch from using a local cell to one based on
geosynchronous satellites than RF would probably not be my first
option since cell phones offer more forms of communication than a
radio (think HT).

-aps (KC2ZSX)