K7HIO.NET

A while back, there was a push in the county (and district, I believe) ARES leadership to establish a notification mechanism other than the telephone.  The motivation behind this was that if something happens and the amateur radio emergency operators are activated, we need a way to get in touch with people that might not be aware that something is going on. Most response scenarios start out with "What do you do after you feel the quake?" which makes notification rather unimportant.  However, what about people outside the affected area being notified that a response is needed?

In reality, if you aren't in the affected area, the telephone will likely still work and will be, by far, the most reliable way to asynchronously notify people that a response it needed.  When that argument was presented locally, the reaction was that the telephone was too "low tech."  So, you'd think that someone with such a response would have another scheme in mind that utilized amateur technology to provide a suitably "high tech" notification mechanism that would likely survive in a case where the telephone system didn't, right?  Well, no, the proposed alternative was to use Twitter and iPhones.  I don't think I need to elaborate further.

Luckily, at K7HIO we have some intelligent out-of-the-box thinkers that took this problem to the drawing board to come up with something reasonable.  Ken, N7QQU had the idea of using repurposed VHF alphanumeric pagers and a Kantronics KPC-9612+ TNC to broadcast alerts in a local area.  Keeping reasonable expectations in mind, this has the potential to provide a way for us to wake people up in the middle of the night or get their attention during the day when something happens that needs an emergency response.

Commercial paging systems strive (well, previously did strive) to saturate their coverage area with reliable service similar to what cell phone carriers do today.  We know that without a huge amount of power and a blimp hovering overhead with an antenna, we're not going to be able to get saturated, reliable coverage for everyone with the pager on their belt at all times.  However, our desired "service area" is relatively small and we don't need to be able to page people anywhere, anytime.  If any page comes through, even corrupted, you'll know something is up.

So, we'll define our success criteria as:

• Pagers must be inexpensive and available for $30-$50
• Pagers must be frequency-agile
• We must be able to page people in their homes with the pager on a desk or table with reasonable reliability
• We must be able to automate the paging system remotely over a radio link to page multiple people automatically