Band Allocation, and Other Emergencies

In October of 2020, my home QTH of Yorba Linda, California was under threat from the Blue Ridge Fire. Our home was never under an evacuation order and, if I'm honest with myself, was never very close to being under an evacuation order. Still, it was a harrowing few days, especially when the dark of night made the flames on distant hillsides visible from our kitchen window.

I spent quite a bit of time monitoring the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE), particularly during the hours when an extended power outage meant that I couldn't get any work done. I listened with the sense of duality familiar to anyone who has used a scanner or monitored utility stations on HF: at once deeply concerned for the lives and property of my neighbors while also fascinated at the spectacle of firefighting tankers flying over my house while my FT-70D's speaker crackled with plans about where the next line of fire retardant would be dropped. 

By any measure, CAL FIRE did a bang-up job on the Blue Ridge fire. Despite the size of the fire and the ferocity of the winds on the fire's first day, and despite CAL FIRE having to spread its resources over two simultaneous incidents in Orange County alone, property damage was kept to a minimum and no serious injuries were associated with that particular incident. In the few days that I spent with various CAL FIRE frequencies tuned in, there may have been some minor lapses in radio procedure or calls that went unanswered for a couple minutes, but nothing gave me any sort of impression that CAL FIRE was lacking in its core competency of working on wildfires, or in the related competency of using communications technology to coordinate those efforts. 

Stories like this should be cause for celebration. After all people's lives and people's homes are on the line. As the robustness of public-safety communications systems increases, and as the people using those systems become better trained, we can expect those agencies to be better equipped to respond to emergencies, or at least to better keep up with the evolving challenges of managing wildfires and other emergencies. 

It also means a diminished role for amateur radio in emergency communications. This is not always taken as welcome news. The ability to assist with emergencies is still listed foremost in the FCC Part 97 regulations as a purpose of amateur radio. A big part of our identity as hams has historically derived from our ability and willingness to help out in time of need. The reality, however, that communications technology has grown up is inescapable. That diminished role is as inevitable as it is, for the reasons mentioned above, desirable.

The amateur radio community may recall that the very agency that I had the opportunity to see and hear in action was the subject of a recent tempest in a teapot over the removal of an unauthorized repeater from a taxpayer-owned communications vault. It appears that a good bit of the controversy can be traced to a state employee's all too candidly worded reference in a memo to amateur radio's diminished emergency-communications role. The memo was poorly written, and its author could benefit from a good talking-to. Amateur radio is, bad writing skills notwithstanding, still alive and well in California and opportunities abound under the auspices of organizations like ARES and RACES for civically-minded hams to volunteer their services. What we can expect, though, is that such service will be almost entirely in a support role. The cases where everything else fails and we rush in to save the day are, thankfully, rare. And I'd like to think that we have the humility to recognize that it's not our role to show public-safety professionals how it's done.

In the United States, the radio frequency (RF) spectrum is thought of as a shared resource to be managed in the public interest. We hear stories of impending doom for our amateur radio band allocations that generally amount to nothing. Still, the public have the right to expect that this shared resource is being used wisely. If we in the amateur radio community expect to hold on to our frequency allocations, we should be prepared to demonstrate that we're providing value for that allocation. We don't take up much of the RF spectrum, so demonstrating that we can contribute value proportionally shouldn't be too difficult. It could be that we catalyze STEM education. It could be that we help spread international goodwill. It could be a willingness to cough up a few bucks on license fees. It could be that we provide an appropriate level of support for emergency communications. Better yet, it could be a combination of some or all of those benefits. I wouldn't hang my hat on any one and, in particular, I wouldn't hang my hat on the last (or, according to the FCC, first) of those.