Courtesy of Norm Styer - AI2C
It's 2222 hours local on Thursday, January 14, 2010. As far as I know, there was no or very little amateur radio voice traffic handled today on any of the nets that I monitored. The two or three local Haiti stations that we know of seem to be struggling and I'm sure they have no eclectic power. One station reportedly came up on 14.300 MHz this morning for a very short time on his 4th radio and powered on by a weak 12-volt battery; he was reportedly connected to family via a stateside phone patch. As time permits I listen to stateside nets calling into the affected area.
Today they backed off taking stateside check-ins since there is no listed traffic. Communications propagation conditions are not all that good and most of these nets are using several control stations to communicate throughout the States. I would expect these nets will eventually be able to handle "Heath and Welfare" type traffic between families and in support of some deployed support personnel; I would not expect "priority or higher" messages to find their way to these nets. In summary, no or very little amateur radio activity from the affected area heard to date.
A radio club from Dom Rep is preparing to go in and set up an emergency amateur radio station on Friday. This is summarized below and you should check their Internet site if you are interested in updates.
Following is information from http://aren. ie/news/ about a Dom Rep amateur radio team going to Haiti on January 15:
"RCD and URDA en route to Haiti
Victor Baez, HI8VB, Secretary of the Radio Club Dominicano (RCD) reports that the RCD with UDRA, Unión Dominicana de Radio Aficionados, are preparing to go to Port au Prince early morning of Friday January 15 to install an emergency radio Communications stastion, HI8RCD/HH, and a mobile station. Victor has a blog which hopefully he will update with more news from Haiti: www.hi8vb.tk "
Check their blog - Internet site at: http://www.hi8vb. tk/ USE BING TO TRANSLATE IT. I right click on my Windows 7 machine to get to the Bing Translate Tab.
I haven't found any amateur radio digital traffic nets but suspect this will be the best mode once things build out - particularly, automatic amateur radio digital forwarding message systems.
Amateur radio frequencies monitored here as time permits are:
14332.0 kHz - YL International SSB Communications System
14300.0 kHz - International Assistance & Traffic Net
14265.0 kHz - Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Net (SATERN)
7697.0 kHz - American Red Cross on USB (Not an amateur radio frequency)
7265.0 kHz - SATERN
7201.0 kHz - YL International SSB Communications System
7087.0 kHz - Reported to be used in the local affected area.
7045.0 kHz - IARU Region II - Emergency Net on LSB
3977.7 kHz - SATERN
3720. kHz - IARU Region II - Emergency Net on LSB
Norm Styer - AI2C
Canby - Clarkes Gap - Loudoun - Virginia
