I'm blogging from the (Seattle) Communications Academy 2008. the MicroHAMS Digital Conference. It's a two-day conference on Amateur Radio Emergency Communications, now in (at least) it's sixth year. It teaches some of the formalities of "more structured" Amateur Radio Emergency ("Net") Communications.
It's my first time attending Comm Academy because I've always had a major personal or professional conflict in previous years. Judging from the turnout I see here in the main auditorium, there are (easily) 300 or more attendees, and the attendance of emergency communications agencies is impressive, including FEMA.
Clearwire is sponsoring the Wi-Fi access. Laptop usage is relatively light, so it seems to be working pretty well.
I'll blog continuously throughout the day.
The absolute highlight of the day for me was the lunchtime presentation by Dr. Charles Simonyi,
which was a fascinating look at being a Space Tourist (the fifth) and
seeing the Russian space program from someone who has really been
there, done that. What was really cool was that Dr. Simonyi is a techie
and gave the crowd the technical perspective of much the things he saw
as part of his experience. It was particularly fascinating to hear
about the "tried, true, cost-effective, why-fix-something-that-works"
choices of the Russian space program.
Lecture on teaching the Incident Command System (ICS) in Pakistan... really hard-hitting lessons about our Western / US assumptions just aren't valid in developing countries like Pakistan. But then, we have our challenges too - at times we get "nuked back into the stone age" (metaphorically)... like Hurricane Katrina.
By Steve Stroh N8GNJ
This article is Copyright © 2008 by Steve Stroh except for specifically-marked excerpts. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged).
Planet Ham is a website designed to aggregate blogs produced by Amateur Radio enthusiasts. The aim is to provide a central directory of Amateur Radio blogs
The backend of the website is based on PlanetPlanet, which fetches syndication feeds such as RSS and Atom from subscribed blogs.
http://www.planetham.com/
To add your blog to the Planet Ham feed please email the web address to webmaster@planetham.com
Posted by: iz8ftw fabio | April 13, 2008 at 11:01 AM