AGREE FULLY !!! There should be no award for no actual operator skills ... click and pray is not Ham Radio !
Not sure unless you check with ARES ... do that before asking such a question...you do know what ARES is?
Gosh, in all my 20+ years of a being a first responder and incident commander just north of Miami, during some of the worst disasters in American history, I'm surprised I've never heard of them. You'd think in my 46 years of being a ham, I'd have heard of... what was it... ARES? Is there really a ham club named after the Greek God of War? Anyhow, I ask again, does anyone know how many reports there were of hams saving lives with "ham data" -- and if it's never used, why bother asking for a waiver?
No doubt about 250 miles north in rural Gainesville. Not one, but two ARRL Sections north of the problems...... Slow speed, radio-based email, accelerated to almost Juno dial-up speed. Time for a few bars of Maureen McGovern's Theme from the Poseidon Adventure: "There's Got to Be a Morning After." ARES saved the day from inside the inverted hull....
So, you don't think that it would be important for the new MARS role as an auxiliary military comms conduit to have the ability to pass claassified information? Apparently some in the DoD do feel the need for speed, reliability and encryption via something besides Winlink. Really? You need to read the War Powers Act. Hams get shut down. Oh, RACES in some situations wouldn't be. As for MARS. that's not amateur radio and is under DoD and uses NTIA-controlled federal spectrum.
True. And again I ask: Was the data waiver used during hurricane Ian, or was it merely another in a series of routine requests designed to highlight ARRL and WL marketing propaganda .... "when all else fails" ??
With services such as StarLink that can be brought up in disaster areas within hours, I foresee things like Winlink becoming less relevant during these events. Why have a single radio operator to funnel things through when you can have high speed data for the entire shelter or command center?
And FEMA assets like their satellite trucks are stationed around the lower 48, at least, and can respond to affected areas quickly. https://twitter.com/fema/status/1576931407435337728/photo/1 If there aren't any in Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands, I'm pretty sure a C130 or C17 could get one or two delivered fairly quickly. A lot faster than another "Force of 50."
I admit I read the FCC ruling but not all the comments here. That said, you can be SURE this is Winlink related.
MARS stations never hold "classified traffic." They use M110A for handling data. A simplex mode that is also used by the military.
Never. Same here, was IC for floods, explosions, large fires, plane crash....for 30+ years. The waiver is to allow faster bit rates for Winlink email using newer modems. That's it. Faster email for sail boaters mostly is the reason. It is coming, the petition to the FCC to make it permanent from the ARRL.
In today's world, using data rate doesn't help anything. That is an old way of looking at things from back when RTTY was pretty much the only digital mode in common use. In those days, higher throughput meant more radio spectrum used, so they did that to keep from taking too much spectrum up with one signal. Nowadays, we can fit more and more data into a smaller and smaller frequency space. The proposals to make this waiver permanent that the ARRL has been working on for a few years will move it to an approach that uses the overall width of the signal, regardless of type of mode or data speed. That should make it suitable going forward, regardless of where our digital innovation takes us.
I've heard the "digital innovation" is being held back by our rules so many times it's no longer funny. What's innovative about email over HF when perfectly good alternatives exist like maybe the internet? Skip the emcomm excuse, it's not needed and more and more neither are hams. The baud rate restriction is useless and needs to go but not for the reasons expressed by the ARRL bus being driven by Winlink. Question: if US hams are being held back from "digital innovation" by Part 97 rules why is the rest of the world, which isn't constrained by those same rules, not developing new fantastical digital modes and systems (both hardware and software)? It's a bit arrogant to think US hams are the only ones capable of developing new digital anything. The other unanswered question about the wideband digital proposals at the FCC is where are they going to be allowed to operate? ARRL says 2.8kHz bw, they tried to takeover entire bands with RM-11306 and RM-11708 cut that back to just the RTTY / Data sub bands. How many 2.8kHz digital signals does it take to completely fill up the current sub bands? Better to just keep all the "wideband digital innovation" off of HF and put it above 6m where there's more than ample room for experimentation and most of it is underutilized.
