Imagine... A Demonstration of Amateur Radio

I heard an NPR report tonight about the meltdown of the cellular networks in Washington DC as a result of the record crowds present for President-Elect Obama's inauguration... and nearly everyone having (and trying to use) a cellphone.

It was comical listening to the description of the problem, especially knowing that access was barely half the problem - the other problem was the switching bottleneck. Another would be handling all the requests for IP addresses :-)

What would have happened if Amateur Radio had been there, providing a real-world example of Amateur Radio being relevant?

Something a lot of like highly localized Wi-Fi HotSpots (think 20' radius) all being fed by high-bandwidth links which are operating on (uncontested) Amateur Radio spectrum like 1.2 GHz using off-the-shelf Broadband Wireless Internet Access gear tuned to 1.24 - 1.30 GHz (60 MHz of spectrum there). A web splash screen briefly mentioning that it was being provided by Amateur Radio and you would have gotten a helluva lot of Blackberry and iPhone-toting techies to be really curious about Amateur Radio.

It would work gloriously.

But then... Amateur Radio wants to stay mired in the past - tube rigs, CW, contesting, analog voice repeaters occupying all VHF and UHF channels... all that.

Sigh...

73,

Steve N8GNJ