Posted on the Public Radio technical disscussion list a short while ago: A friend of mine, Joe Perez, works at Harris in Mason, OH in the systems engineering department. He has given an excellent update as to the situation of getting several NYC FM stations (and perhaps TV) back up on running as quickly as possible. I thought those on the list might be curious as to what was happening since communications are not the best out of the city at this point: It's been a busy couple of days. As of this moment, we have three 1 kilowatt solid-state Quest series transmitters and matching ERI 2 bay 1/2 wave LPX antennas going up there on a dedicated truck. These are for WPAT, WNYC, and WKCR. Several television transmitters and antennas are also on the truck, which is headed to a secure staging facility in Jersey. Cablewave has sent a quantity of 1/2" line along with male N connectors and N to 1-5/8 adapters. I also called Modulation Sciences this afternoon, and they agreed to send a pair of Sidekick subcarrier generators to WKCR so that they can get their aux services (a Chinese language program and a reading service for the blind) back up as well. WKCR's new studio is 95% complete, and in an ironic twist Richard had just installed a 1/2" line from the tech room to the roof, and placed a 4' STL dish at the top of it. That dish will now come down and be replaced with one of the LPX antennas, and we will put their Quest transmitter in the racks. They have an Orban 8000 on site (which was removed from WTC last week and replaced with a new 8400) which will be used as the stereo generator. I do not have a confirmed location for WPAT and WNYC. As the situation progresses the story has changed from the WQXR tower to the muni building at 1 Center Street to the possibility of a sub-combiner at Empire, where there is rumored to be an open port on the master antenna. Our install crew in Manhattan is safe in the upper west side, and so far most of our customers are accounted for. Still no word regarding the TV engineers who were up on 110 at the time. One of them called his station immediately after the first impact, but I fear that none of them were able to make it down past the damage. I cannot even imagine what the situation up there was like, but I just pray that perhaps they got to the roof and managed to flag down a helicopter. Hal Kneller WGCU FM/WMKO Fort Myers, FL hkneller@fgcu.edu

Dave Hughes (dave) Sat Sep 29 '01 (12:02) 42 lines The radios are, by and large off the shelf. But the FCC Part 15 Rules limit the 'radiated power' from the antennas, not just at the radio. So one can, physically, feed the radios into large, higher gain antennas, and get much longer ranges. Which is against the FCC Rules. And one can put 'amplifiers' between the radio and the antenna, boosting radiated power. Again, getting longer range or penetrating (trees, buildings) power. Freewave of Boulder sells the Defense Department their standard 1 watt, 6 db antenna-gain radios, AND a 5 watt, inline amplifier, that kicks their range from 5-10 miles to 50 and 100. Because I was doing NSF controlled experiments for wireless for education, I legally used the amplifier between the tiny Hispanic town of San Luis, and 30 mile distant Alamosa, to connect up the school, free. (While US West wanted $2,000 a month to link them wired). But the school could not do that legally, themselves. After Clinton visited Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation, the poorest in the nation, wringing his hands about the 'digital divide', I calculated that I could connect up every single Indian family abode, wirelessly, free from the center line of the narrow reservation, at 10mbps (ethernet speed) carrying data and voice over IP, and feed it into the net, and voice US West in Rapid City, SD, for maybe $5 million total, charge maybe $5 a month per family to make it worth something, and pay running costs. And I handed the whole plan to Cisco, which had just gotton into the Wireless business and ladle's out millions (at least then) for grants, and suggested they do it pro-bono to show what could be done, not only domestically, but across the world, profitably for any US radio manufacturer, if the FCC and Dept of Commerce just pulled their head out of their a**. But they choked. So the same technology Hedy Lamarr invented in 1941 to help us win the war against the Nazis, and which is now being used in the guidance system of cruise missles, is the same technology that can link anyone on this globe to the net at ridiculously low cost (primarily the radio) and which is the same techonology I have offered in another item here in attack, to help defend us from chemical/biological attack. But there are none so blind

Thanks for this - Ihave been posting such things in Geo and in Radio 32. UIf this is really a topic for emergency preparedness, would someone please link it to Geo conference, please. I have much to add and will remove my topic which is similar. Thanks. I am unable to telnet or to ftp, even before I crashed Geo. Please someone fix it... PLEASE!!!

Author: Dave R (---.166.45.216.susc.suscom.net) Date: 09-12-04 17:59 For anyone with access to either an amateur radio HF radio (and ham license) or shortwave receiver, here are some of the frequencies that are currently being used for emergency communications into and out of the affected areas of hurricane Ivan. 1. 14.325 - Hurricane Watch Net - Weather and radio traffic into and out of the affected area. URL: http://www.hwn.org/ for additional information and http://www.hurricanecity.com for audio feeds (broadband best). 2. 14.338 - Addtional traffic for Cayman, Cuba, and Yucatan. 3. 14.283 - Caribus (health & welfare) 4. 14.300 - International Maritime Net 5. 21310.0 USB Health & Welfare (Spanish) 6. 21390.0 USB Inter-Americas (health & welfare) 7. 14265.0 USB Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio (SATERN) 8. 3950 Hurricane Watch Net (alternate) Depending on your location, propagation (signal quality) may affect the reception of your radio. An outside wire antenna is best but some shortwave radio's have antennas that will pickup even the most distant signals. Hope this information helps. Dave - Call Sign - AI9D

New and old radio technologies have roles in homeland security Mar 4, 2005 4:50 PM By Doug Mohney At the 2005 Homeland Security & Global Security Summit in Washington, D.C., this week, leading-edge ultrawideband (UWB) radio technology was side-by-side next to old-fashioned, but still critical, radio gear, specifically antennas. While UWB is one of the latest high-tech twists in the war on terrorism, there's a healthy demand for low-tech antennas that trace their linage back to the days of Marconi. Pulse~LINK, a start-up based in San Diego, Calif., demonstrated the ability for their UWB technology to send multiple simultaneous video streams in a secure fashion. "Pulse~LINK is not aiming for the wireless USB market, but the video market," said Bruce Watkins, Pulse~LINK's President. "We've got a much more secure and faster solution than Wi-Fi." Watkins had a spectrum analyzer operating in the booth and used it to point out the operation of Wi-Fi networks in the 2.4 GHz band on the show floor, as well as random RF noise from other devices. Not wishing to be named, a security analyst unassociated with the company at a nearby booth had identified five unsecured Wi-Fi networks on the show floor. "They have the only secure network here," said the analyst. The demonstration network consisted of four nodes, each one constructed from the company's evaluation kit hardware and set up in a small "pico-net" LAN. A mixture of pre-recorded and real-time video were broadcast around the company's 20-foot-by-20-foot booth. Currently existing in bulky "brassboard" form requiring a double-height PC enclosure to hold a large PCI card, the technology is in the process of being streamlined and put into final form in a silicon chip set for incorporation into useable devices. Watkins said the chip set should be sampling in May or June of 2005 with "commercially available" silicon available in the first quarter of 2006. Currently capable of delivering around 1 Gb/s data rates, Watkins indicated that further improvements to the basic technology could easily double performance in the future. Watkins envisions the technology being used in applications where video needs to be transmitted from cameras to first responders and security personnel on laptops and even portable devices like PDAs and cell phones. "You could have a portable TiVo," Watkins said. "People would get the video downloaded [to their device], rewind it, focus on suspicious activity. It's an application you just can't do with existing [wireless] technology." Existing Wi-Fi networks don't have the bandwidth, he said, and it's more difficult to operate a secure application on a public network. Pulse~LINK's proprietary C-Wave� technology implementation for public safety use will be different from consumer applications, and therefore more secure. Around the corner from Pulse~LINK, CSA Wireless representative Bill Whittington was grinning from ear to ear as he talked about the booming demand for the company's HF antennas. "With one of our antennas you can reach anywhere in the 48 states," said Whittington. "Everyone had gotten out of the HF antenna business, so it's the only reason why you'll see [CSA] here. Who's going to do further R&D on a 1908 product?" CSA Wireless got into the business in the early 1900s when Marconi turned to the ship-mast company for something to string his antennas on and started dedicated manufacture of antennas during World War II. Whittington said most people and agencies considered HF "a black art," but computerized radios and the events of 9/11 had brought new life into use of the 2 to 30 MHz bands. "You can have someone set up a radio to communicate over HF, allowing for factors such as time of day and what bands aren't usable. Once it's set up, anyone can simply turn it on and get dial tone." In preparation for potential Y2K "bug" problems, all state National Guard units setup an HF communications network. While there were no Y2K communications problems, the HF network was already built. After the 9/11 attacks, the National Guard Association in Washington D.C. used their HF equipment to communicate with personnel in New York City from http://mrtmag.com/news/homeland_security_technologies_030405/