Emergency Features On Your Radio

We all have our radios set up to work our favorite nets and friends. How useful are those settings in an emergency?

There are two main considerations for emergency configurations of your radios.
1. Power consumption.
2. Useful emergency-only features.

Your Handi-Talky radio turns on with NO illumination on the display. This is to conserve power. Your mobile rig turns on with the display brightly illuminated. Not a problem in your car on the way to work, big problem in an emergency situation.

What about operating modes? The ARRL has put a big push behind WINLINK for use in emergencies. EchoLink and MT63 have also been found to be useful in certain situations. Some mobile rigs are now EchoLink capable right out of the box.

In an actual emergency, there will be lots of traffic on the FRS & GMRS frequencies. Our ham radios can monitor that traffic, but not transmit on those frequencies. Since most newer radios have hundreds or thousands of memory channels, it makes sense to program in the FRS & GMRS frequencies so that you can listen for people calling for help in an emergency. One of the very best and most complete listings I have ever seen of those frequencies is located at
http://ba-marc.org/writeups/gmrs-frs-freq.htm

The information given there will also let you know which modes are allowed on which channels and which frequencies are GMRS repeater inputs.


Another group of useful frequencies to place in your radio are the aircraft frequencies. Fun to listen to when you have spare time, very informative during an emergency. The Salt Lake City listings are found at
http://www.radioreference.com/apps/db/?aid=2958

By going to the home page of that site (http://www.radioreference.com), you can get the frequencies for any city and also find a wealth of ham radio information for all types of services.

The one feature that could be more useful than any other in an emergency is IRLP. If you haven't tried it, jump in and learn how it works. You may need it when the problem strikes. All you have to do is tune to your local IRLP frequency and (if there is no traffic) simply announce your call sign and the word "Listening" or "Monitoring". I've had fascinating conversations on IRLP by announcing that I was interested in discussing Ham Radio Emergency Communications. Try it, you'll be hooked!

Two very handy optional features for your HT radio are a battery pack that takes AA size batteries and a Speaker-Microphone. AAs are plentiful and a great reserve battery. You can put a pack of 48 of them (Costco) in your Grab And Go pack and operate for a long time without recharging anything. The Speaker-Mic makes emergency operation so much easier because you can have both hands free most of the time and you do not have to hold the radio, which can become very hot during extended QSO's. This is especially true of the newer mini or "pocket size" radios that have a much smaller chassis to dissipate the heat.

That's all for now.
N7OZH