I’ll call *BULL* on that. The Child’s Band has proven itself to be worthless noise may times over. The band is no good for consistent local communications beyond a couple miles because of the limited power (5 watts) and no repeaters. Should the band be open (have ‘skip’) it’s totally worthless, channel nine or not.
Any attempt to cross-band with CB is illegal even if for some reason that group ever chose to grow up and participate like adults.
Hams are allowed 1500 watts of output power (even into ‘gain’ antennas which improve the signals) and may use repeaters, including crossband repeaters. They use either FM or SSB for voice (not heterodyning AM which is inefficient use of power, only 1.5 watts of AM is actually used compared to a 5 watt SSB signal) or when it gets really thin there are digital modes that work extremely well under poor conditions.
What hams CAN do is cross communicate with the military via MARS and by Presidential proclamation. Beyond that, they are limited to talking with hams.
What they SHOULD do is monitor the local fire/LE channels to gain a larger picture, but they can’t talk to them via radio either.
Rick wa6nhc
From: Jorene Downs
An option to amateur radio that some are using in the
preparedness is Citizen's Band (CB) radio in the 11m (27MHz) band.
<snipped>
Note that trained RACES, ARES and other disaster-active ham operators should
have a preplan to monitor CB emergency channel 9, particularly during a
disaster.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Jorene Downs
KJ6JCD
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