Rick, you might want to read some reviews of the more powerful contemporary CB radios, where users are reporting viable and fairly reliable communications hundreds of miles away, even across multiple state lines. Regardless, if the power grid is down long term many ham repeaters won't last long on backup power, or repeater access may be restricted to only authorized ham users such as ARES or RACES. So relying on ham repeaters for personal use may not be a good plan in case local personal communications are limited to more line of sight and pre-organized relays.
I'm not saying I think CB is a better choice than ham radio, just an option to consider. I'm sharing that some serious disaster preppers are choosing to go with stout CB because they think it is a better option for *long* term incident survival radio communications. They are thinking months or even years in their disaster prepping. And yes, some of those preppers with CBs are also ham operators experienced at regularly communicating thousands of miles away.
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Jorene Downs
KJ6JCD
From: Rick Bates [mailto:HappyMoosePhoto@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2013 4:11 PM
To: californiadisasters@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: [californiadisasters] Possible new Radio - help needed
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 USA for disaster
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.
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Jorene Downs
KJ6JCD
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