OK, I Get It

I'm testing a new radio for portable EMCOMM work. This is a radio I've considered for years, and has a feature set that looks pretty impressive on paper, but the form factor always put me off. But a recent interest in finding a single radio that would serve as an excellent candidate for ARES, EMCOMM & MARS use in Georgia caused me to finally overlook my aversion to the form factor and give it a try.

The Icom IC-7100

I had been using the Yaesu FT-891 as a portable station, but it's shortcomings continued to grate on me. So much so that recently I had switched back to using the much larger Icom 7200 for portable work. It was a bit heavier to schlep to the field, but overall its performance was much better. 

What killed the FT-891 for me is that a few months back a small group of local hams went to a park for a few hours of playing radio and swapping lies. A good friend brought his FT-891 to operate. The phase noise from the FT-891 was so bad that it effectively drove all other radios off the air. That was it. My (second) FT-891 had to go.

At the same time I was doing some evaluation of JS8CALL for our local ARES group, and working on an implementation proposal for HF communications support for Emergency Management Agencies (EMA) in Georgia. Part of this effort was identifying a radio that came closest to meeting the HF and VHF/UHF EMCOMM needs in a single, easy to use and easy to support package. The requirements for this idealized radio included:

• A built-in sound card for HF digital modes - and ease of setup for digital modes
• Built-in antenna tuner
• DSTAR capability on VHF FM - DSTAR is an adopted communication standard with Georgia ARES, so DSTAR capability is important
• Ease of programming, with the possibility of programming 'over the air' or via the internet
• Full 100 watts on HF, 50 watts on VHF
• Overall ease of use - something a minimally trained ARES operator could fall in on and get up and running with little assistance
• Good build quality and reliability
• Ease of modification for MARS use

What I was really after was a 'shack-in-the-box', a single radio that can do it all. Initially I looked at the Yaesu FT-991A. I own this radio and really like it. It performs without most of the drama that came with the FT-891, but still has some shortcomings. Particularly the almost maddening firmware menu complexity which makes it difficult to configure for digital modes. Once it's all set up it's a digital mode champ, but don't you DARE adjust any one of the dozen or so settings that can impact digital operations or you'll screw everything up. It's as big a drama queen in this as the FT-891 (they share the same menu structure).

The FT-991A had two other shortcomings that are not really the fault of the radio, just a reflection of external issues that make it less than ideal. First, it lacks DSTAR capability. Yaesu is wedded to C4FM (System Fusion), a competing VHF/UHF digital mode. Nothing wrong with C4FM, it's just that DSTAR is the VHF digital mode standard in Georgia ARES. Next, Yaesu radios don't work well with the MARS digital software modem package, MS-DMT. Again, this is not the fault of the FT-991A. The developer of MS-DMT hasn't built any of the digital feature settings for the FT-991A into the configuration library for MS-DMT. This makes it very difficult to get any current production Yaesu HF radio working with MS-DMT.

So this left me searching for another 'shack-in-the-box' option, and it needed to be a radio that's in current production. The search immediately narrowed down to one option - the Icom IC-7100.

As I mentioned earlier, I've looked at the IC-7100 on-and-off over the years for my own personal use, but I was always put off by the form factor. I'm not alone in this - just read the reviews on eHam or QRZ.com. Folks just don't 'get' the odd control head configuration. It's so... well, it's just odd for a radio marketed as a mobile rig.

I'm sorry, it just reminds me of the old Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III desktop computer 😄:

But in this evaluation we're focusing on function, not form, and the TRS-80 IC-7100 hits most of the performance objectives I outlined above. 

A few weeks ago, through QRZ.com, I was lucky enough to find an Amateur Radio operator in Michigan who had an IC-7100 that he was willing to trade for my Yaesu FT-891. I've been evaluating the IC-7100 pretty heavily since I got it, and I have to say that now... I 'get it'. The control head is actually very well thought out, and perhaps the best (or only) way to incorporate both a large touch screen and traditional settings buttons in a single interface. The 'odd' control head is a winner. The only shortcoming is the relatively low screen resolution. The low resolution works against the otherwise excellent interface. 

The IC-7100 meets all of the evaluation criteria with the exception of a built-in tuner. Some may be surprised to hear me state that of all the criteria I could live without, a built-in tuner is at the top of the list. Most built-in tuners can only match 'almost resonant' antennas - they have at best a 4:1 impedance matching capability. In EMCOMM you may need to have to try to match anything from a busted CB antenna to a few hundred feet of chain link fence just to get a signal out. An internal tuner will be useless for this task, so you'll need a more robust external tuner anyway. Let me use my IC-7300 as an example. I run that radio with an end-fed wire antenna that is 'almost resonant' on the HF ham bands. But I also use the same setup for MARS, which operates well outside of the Amateur Radio frequency ranges, and the end fed wire has no close natural resonance on those frequencies. This forces me to bypass the 7300's internal tuner and use an external 200 watt tuner so I can safely run digital modes at 100 watts (a tuner's digital mode capability is usually half or less than its rated SSB capability, due to the more demanding full duty cycle of the digital modes). 

Icom has also slipped in a few additional 'parlor tricks' that add greatly to the radio's usefulness for EMCOMM work. First is the ability to sweep frequencies within a band for antenna resonance - a built-in SWR meter. While the functionality is somewhat limited, it is still very useful. Let's say you are supporting an EOC and you need to move over to a new HF antenna, but don't have a tuner. The built in SWR meter will at least let you know if the new antenna is close to resonance. Next is a built-in voltage meter. Very important if you are operating on battery power. Last, the IC-7100 incorporates a basic band sweep feature that can let you know where there's any band activity. While not really necessary for EMCOMM, for regular use it can let you know how busy the band is. Icom also incorporates a temperature monitor, so you can tell how hot your radio is running, and (Praise the Lord!) backlit buttons on the control head, so you can see what you are doing in the dark.

Icom has done a really good job with the information presentation on the IC-7100.
I just wish the resolution was better. But, it works!

Configuration for digital modes has been dead simple. I've found Icom radios - the 7100, 7200 and 7300 - to be as close to 'plug-and-play' on digital modes as you can possibly get. What helps is that this series of radios is very well supported by the digital software developers. So far I've run the IC-7100 on Winlink (using VARA on HF and on VHF with a TNC-X), and with JS8CALL and using HRD's Digital Master module. It works smoothly with all software. I've only got two recommendations - make sure you use the correct CI-V address (for the 7100 it's 88) and don't rely on the Icom baud rate 'Auto' setting. Manually set the radio's baud rate to something like 9600 and make sure it matches in the digital mode software's rig control interface. After that it should be smooth sailing.

Before closing let me discuss one of the features that the IC-7100 offers that I don't think gets a whole lot of attention, and that is the concept of 'over-the-air programming'. This is something that the military and commercial communications systems have used for decades. While implementation with the IC-7100 would be crude by comparison, it is still a concept that can work. The IC-7100 takes SD cards, and you can program the IC-7100 using an Icom .icf file stored on an SD card. The .icf files are small enough (< 300k) that they can be easily transferred as email attachments, even via Winlink. So, if an ARES EC working at the state or regional level needs to get a new settings file out to the operators in the field, even in a full 'lights out' scenario, the file can be easily transferred over the air as a Winlink attachment, downloaded to an SD card and uploaded to the radio, all in a matter of minutes. 

My evaluation of the IC-7100 will continue, but based on my testing so far I think it is perhaps the best available option for a fully featured EMCOMM radio. Icom really did a great job with this rig, so don't be like me and let the form factor put you off.

W8BYH out

The EMCOMM Layer Cake, Part 2

Happy New Year!

In Part 1 of this two part series I laid out the case that low-band HF communications fills a critical EMCOMM shortfall that exists in most local EMAs. It's a largely unacknowledged requirement but one, I'm sure, that will become blindingly obvious to every EMA director faced with a Hurricane Maria-level communications outage.

I believe it's important that ARES groups prepare to fill this requirement and build HF comms expertise - make it an organic part of their services delivery package.

But what to deliver? It's not enough to just show up at the EOC with an HF radio and a bundle of wire and exclaim "I'm with ARES and I'm here to help!" In fact, that's the worst thing you can do. Instead we have to deliver a communications service, one that demonstrates the ability to seamlessly and effectively communicate with adjacent, higher and lower EMA organizations. The EMA director won't care that this service is based on HF, on NVIS, uses Winlink or JS8CALL. All he or she will care about is that the service works, is responsive, fills a real-world need and is professionally managed by skilled ARES personnel.

What kind of traffic will an EMA need to have moved? Most of it will likely be ICS formatted messages and free text communications between agencies. Winlink excels at this task. It has ICS message tools built into the desktop application and can transition seamlessly between transmission modes; internet-based (telnet), VHF/UHF packet-based, and HF based. This means Winlink in the hands of a skilled, experienced and properly equipped ARES member can effectively work under a wide variety of changing EMCOMM conditions. If the internet is up, use Telnet. If the internet is down (or over-burdened), switch to VHF or UHF to hit a local Winlink node. If there's no local VHF/UHF nodes switch to HF to hit a node outside of the impacted area. If nodes are unreachable try peer-to-peer to a station that can reach a Winlink node. Because of this incredible flexibility and robustness, Winlink-based communications should be the foundational service that ARES groups offer to their EMAs.

If Winlink has a shortcoming it's the system's node-to-node, or one-to-one architecture. It's one Winlink operator connecting to one Winlink node to pass traffic to a specific set of email addresses. But what if traffic needs to be sent to, or received from, an agency that for some reason doesn't have email capability? In a Hurricane Maria-like scenario this is not an inconceivable situation. This is where we need an ICS-compliant one-to-many or many-to-one capability. In this situation a soundcard-based digital application like Fldigi running either PSK-31 or the faster PSK-125 mode is called for. Actually, the software is less important than the ability to operate in the PSK mode and pass ICS traffic, and there are several software packages that could be used. However, Fldigi is the ideal candidate because it's robust, has built-in ICS message functionality, has become an unofficial ARES standard so there's a large pool of embedded experience in the ARES community, runs well on a variety of platforms (Linux, Raspbian, Windows XP/7/10), and it's free.

In this we see the development of what I term the 'layer cake' concept of  EMCOMM support. Think of this paradigm:

Note the bottom layer in the software stack - coordination & last option comms. Winlink and Fldigi are very good at what they do, but there are weaknesses in both of these platforms that were revealed during Hurricane Maria. First, neither of these modes do particularly well in poor band conditions. Winlink performance can be improved using tools such as a Pactor 3/4 hardware modem or the VARA software modem, but we simply can't expect average ARES members to bear the cost of additional hardware or software. Second, neither of these operate particularly well in crowded band conditions. Third, PSK-31 and PSK-125 offer no forward error correction and only limited error detection, meaning Fldigi often delivers as much garbled text as it delivers clear copy.

This bottom of the software layer stack is reserved for an application that can serve as a dedicated ARES coordination channel and as a last-ditch weak signal communications tool. When all else fails, what can the ARES operator fall back on to get basic, short and unformatted emergency traffic out?

Today, the best option to fill that bottom layer role seems to be JS8CALL. JS8CALL is currently under evaluation by our local ARES group, but so far its performance is impressive. Its weak signal capabilities are very robust, successfully decoding message strings that are heard at SNR levels well below -18 dB (that's way more noise than signal). Yes, the JS8 mode is slow - we'll never be able to pass ICS formatted message traffic using JS8CALL. But... slow-go is better than no-go.

I'll be doing a blog post specifically on JS8CALL in the near future, but let me list a few of the other key JS8CALL capabilities that I feel make it the ideal candidate to fill that bottom software layer:

• the ability to establish call groups (ex: @GAARES), which greatly eases the job of sending traffic to multiple recipients (one-to-many relationship) and to help establish a mission-specific network topology
• the ability to direct third party stations to either directly forward message traffic to the intended recipient, or to store the traffic for later retrieval by the recipient station
• robust checksum-based error detection - no garbage
• auto-acknowledgement of received messages
• JS8CALL is professionally developed - it's robust and stable and the learning curve is relatively flat
• it runs on a wide variety of platforms - Windows, Linux, Raspbian, OSx
• it's free

So if we accept JS8CALL as that bottom level of the software stack the 'layer cake' looks like this:

So what? Just why, and how, is this 'layer cake' important? Remember, we're selling a capability to EMA directors and personnel that they don't even realize they need. It's important to focus on requirements and show that we can meet those requirements with an easily understood support concept. Nothing pie-in-the-sky, nothing that requires new technology or infrastructure, and one that is as close to zero cost to the served agency and ARES members as you can get. By focusing on just the elements in this 'layer cake', ARES groups can build effective training and exercise scenarios that emphasize skills development and quickly build organizational expertise.

There's more to this discussion that will be covered in future blog posts. For example, what should the hardware layer look like? Here's a cue for the upcoming post on that topic - you can't run any of these modes simultaneously on the same radio/computer/antenna setup. We'll talk about ideas for addressing that later. But for now I'd love to have your feedback! You can comment directly to this post, or contact me at w8byh@arrl.net.

Thanks!

W8BYH out

The EMCOMM Layer Cake, Part 1

It's been a busy couple of months. Thanksgiving and Christmas, new granddaughter, some heavy requirements at work and, to top it all off, I was asked to do some digital mode software evaluations for our local ARES groups.

For a few years I've been holding familiarization and training sessions for Winlink. In my opinion, Winlink is one of the 'killer apps' for Amateur Radio in general, and the killer app for ARES and EMCOMM work. I make no secret of my admiration for the entire Winlink system, from the quality of the desktop client software to the extent and depth of the Winlink node infrastructure. It is a robust, professionally developed and maintained communications infrastructure that you can buy into for zero bucks. If it were up to me I'd make a high level of demonstrated Winlink proficiency a minimum requirement for ARES membership. If you can't prove that you can be up and running and sending ICS formatted message traffic via Winlink within 30 minutes of arrival at an EOC or other EMA location (fire station, etc.) then just don't bother showing up. So hold on to this thought for a bit.

What I've really been focusing on since November is a fairly new digital mode package called JS8CALL. I won't get too deep into the particulars about JS8CALL - it deserves its own blog post. I'll just say that JS8CALL seems to offer some real promise for EMCOMM work. JS8CALL is a low speed, weak signal free text communications tool, inspired by the FT8 protocol but modified to be able to handle longer message strings. As the developer, Jordan Sherer, KN4CRD, says, "JS8 is the mode, JS8CALL is the application". At work I spend a lot of time and money on software development. I don't do it myself, I pay developers to build focused applications that meet real world needs. I can spot good software a mile away. JS8CALL is really good software.

So what? There's lots of slick software out there for ARES to use. The real question is, does JS8CALL fill a real world need? Or if it's adopted will it end up being just another another ARES EMCOMM 'toy', fun to play with but fills no real need, or fills a need but falls short on performance?

So here, dear reader, is the real subject of this series of blog posts: what do our primary supported agencies - county and state EOCs and incident command posts - really need that they can't provide for themselves? What communications capability do most of these agencies lack and, in most cases, don't even realize they need? And how can ARES fill that gap?

Identifying real-world EMCOMM requirements gaps requires a needs assessment done in conjunction with emergency management agency (EMA) directors. Each EMA's needs will be slightly different, so it's important to sit down with the individual directors and go over their communications plans to see just where ARES can fit in. The killer question to ask each director is this: what happens in an unlikely but still plausible 'very bad day' scenario like Hurricane Maria - a scenario where all of your comms systems go dark, even for just an hour or two? No repeaters, no phones, no internet. What do you do then? How do you reach outside of your county to get critical information to adjacent county or state-level EOCs? I think we can make an accurate educated guess about the answer to this question.

Since Katrina, the professional EMCOMM community at the federal, state and local levels have made great strides in both expanding and hardening their VHF and UHF communications infrastructure. These guys and gals are good at what they do, and they take their jobs very seriously. The average EMA communications infrastructure in any county in the US is far more robust and capable than anything Amateur Radio can provide. Our UHF/VHF repeater-based services are crude and out-dated by comparison. In this realm we don't bring anything to the table that the average EMA doesn't already has, in spades.

It's also ludicrous for us to think that our Amateur Radio repeater infrastructure will survive any 'very bad day' event. If hardened EMCOMM systems go dark, ours will too. Consider this - in my county we have several Amateur Radio EMCOMM repeaters sitting on public service towers owned by state and county agencies. These repeaters are tied into the same power sources as the EMA systems on the same towers. If any of those tower sites go dark then everything on that tower goes dark, including the Amateur Radio repeaters. Many would say "yes, but there are other repeaters in the county on private towers that we can use!" Well OK - how many of those repeaters would survive a Maria-level storm event? Or an F1 tornado? Or a heavy flood? Or the owner forgetting to charge the back-up batteries?

The one operating mode that can answer the capabilities gap question is low-band HF (the high frequency 40, 60 & 80 meter bands). HF using NVIS antenna configurations can reach into the next subdivision, into the next county, into the next state, all while operating completely off-grid and independent of other systems. In addition, the newly created 60 meter interoperability channels give local, state and federal agencies a dedicated HF 'chat space', a place on the HF spectrum where everybody knows everyone else will be monitoring. HF is that last ditch, everything's else has gone dark, communications tool.

But very few (if any) local EMAs have organic HF capability. It simply isn't in their communications mix. For decades the federal government and the DoD have de-emphasized HF communications and pushed virtually everything over to point-to-point UHF and VHF (and SATCOMM for the feds with a lot of our tax dollars to throw around). The state and local EMCOMM communities just naturally followed along. HF communications systems were viewed as finicky, requiring special skills, radios and antennas, and reliability was too dependent on propagation. The emphasis in the EMCOMM world was to simplify - all an EMCOMM operator should need to do is press the PTT switch on an HT and all the magic takes place behind the curtain. Delivering that level of service is how Motorola became a multi-billion dollar company.

But starting with Hurricane Katrina, then Super Storm Sandy and then Hurricane Maria, the federal and state governments realized that it isn't just possible, but highly likely, that most point-to-point communications would go down during a catastrophic weather event like a hurricane. EMCOMM agencies worked to harden existing systems and build greater redundancy, but they also realized that HF, while imperfect, could give them the off-grid, short and long-haul comms capability they badly need in the hours immediately after a catastrophic event. This realization is what led directly to the creation of the federal government's SHARES program. For its part the DoD started pushing HF capability back into the force structure, mainly in the National Guard which has primary responsibility for civil/military interaction during disasters. There's even a renewed emphasis on the Army MARS program with a corresponding move to an all-HF infrastructure.

We can see the need, but just how would HF communications fit in to a local EMA EMCOMM support plan? We'll tackle that in Part 2 as we circle back to Winlink and JS8CALL, so stay tuned!

W8BYH out (for now)

You Can Go Home Again

I found out yesterday that you can go home again, at least in Amateur Radio.

Yesterday as I was leaving the Stone Mountain Hamfest in Lawrenceville, GA I made one last sweep through the boneyard and stopped to talk with David, AG4F. David looked like he was trying to unload the worlds largest collection of 32-bit computer parts, and reported he actually had some measure of success. Seems there's a buyer for EVERYTHING at a hamfest!

At the table next to David's I noticed the seller had two nice looking Radio Shack HTX-202 2-meter HTs for sale. One was in the box, with all accessories still in the unopened packaging. The only thing missing was the Ni-Cad battery pack, but that's to be expected for a radio that went out of production 20 years ago. The package did include the AA cell battery holder so I knew I could at least power it up and use it portable. We haggled a bit and I walked off with a part of my Amateur Radio past.

The HTX-202 was my first Amateur Radio transceiver. I bought it in 1995 after being licensed at Fort Hood, TX and assigned the callsign KC5YNP. The radio was an expensive purchase back then - something like $200. But the HTX-202 had a great reputation and, perhaps most important, the local Radio Shack store in Killeen, TX sold a lot of ham radio gear and did a great job of supporting the local Amateur Radio community so I figured it was a safe purchase.

But my experience shows the importance of mentoring (or 'elmering' as it's called in the ham radio world). I struggled with the radio for a few weeks and couldn't bring up most of the repeaters in the Fort Hood area. I ended up taking it back to the Radio Shack store and had them ship it off to the repair facility in Fort Worth. To say I was peeved that Radio Shack had sold me a defective radio would be an understatement. A week later the store called and told me my radio was back from Fort Worth and ready to be picked up. I dropped by the store after work and when the sales guy handed it back to me he said, "They didn't find anything wrong with it"

I fired the radio up right there in the store and tried to hit one of the local Killeen repeaters. No luck. I gave the sales guy a stern look. "It sure doesn't look to me like this thing works!"

"Have you set the PL tones?" he asked.

"What's a PL tone?"

I got a quick block of instruction (that 'elmering' thing again) and thirty minutes later I walked out of the store embarrassed as hell but with all the PL tones for every repeater between Dallas and Houston loaded in the radio.

That HTX-202 ended up doing yeoman work. I took it with me on field exercises on Fort Hood and allowed my Soldiers to use it to make phone patch calls home. It rode in the car with me everywhere, becoming my 'mobile' rig. I even took it to Six Flags Over Texas, and got the 'you're an embarrassment' look from the YL when I pulled it out of my backpack just before getting on the Yogi Bear ride. I eventually put up an MFJ ground plane antenna in my back yard and bought a used 35 watt amplifier. From my house on Fort Hood I could bring up repeaters in Austin, a good 60 miles away. When all you can afford is one radio, you make do.

One memorable day in May, 1997 my wife and I stood in our back yard at Fort Hood and watched an unbelievably ugly storm system pass just to our east. Weather systems don't usually scare me, but this one did. I told my wife to get the kids inside, and I rushed in to fire up the HTX-202. Just 20 miles south of us that storm system dropped an F5 tornado on the ground that literally wiped the small town of Jarrell off the map. If you were not under ground when the tornado hit you were dead. Period. I listened in morbid fascination as repeaters from Waco to San Marcos lit up with tornado and storm damage reports, weather warnings and calls for assistance. I was hooked. That little radio was my window into things well beyond my line of sight.

Later in 1997 we moved to Germany and the HTX-202 went into storage. In 2000 we found ourselves back in the US, in Fayetteville GA. Soon after settling in I pulled out the HTX-202, found a few local repeater frequencies and got back on the air. I'm still on the air, on the same repeaters, almost daily.

Somewhere along the way the old HTX-202 became just an obsolete piece of gear, and I sold it off to a local ham who wanted to run a packet station with it. Well, packet is dead, and I'm sure that old radio is too. I soon came to regret getting rid of the HTX-202; it was my 'first love' in ham radio and it taught me a lot. I always told myself that one day I'd find a replacement and bring it home, for nostalgia reasons. Well yesterday was that day.

The radio works, but returns an 'Er1' code, which means the internal memory battery is dead (dead, dead, dead...). But that's an easy fix, and a replacement battery is already on the way from Amazon. I did manage to get a local repeater frequency and tone loaded and confirmed the radio does work (just don't turn it off or all the memories get wiped - the dead battery thing).

So I'm tickled pink to have my first radio back. It'll assume an honored place among my collection of handheld radios and, who knows, maybe I'll fire it up sometime try to make a phone patch - for old times sake.

W8BYH out.

The S--- Truly Has Hit The Fan

We learned just a few days ago that the Kincade Fire in California has turned into a 'perfect storm' of high winds, dry conditions, political malfeasance, idiotic environmental policy, bad utility management practices and poor power grid maintenance. As a result, California is probably the first political entity in America to simultaneously shut off power to millions of residents, allow explosive fires to devour tens of thousands of acres of poorly managed state land, and cause entire critical communications networks to 'go dark' for no good reason. In short, a self-inflicted gunshot wound of the highest order.

When I started this blog a few years back I promised myself I'd keep it non-political. After all, dear reader, I want you to come here for pithy Amateur Radio content, not political bashing. But California is just too deserving a target. If what's happening in California were instead happening in south Georgia the press would be all over the story, blaming the toothless Bible-thumping rednecks of the region for the situation. But because this is happening in The Golden State - the land of feel-good environmental policy, the bullet train to nowhere, celebrity governors and beaches littered with Beautiful People - the mainstream media seems utterly uninterested in trying to find out how and why things got this bad.

Huge swaths of central California have 'gone dark' and will go dark again (and again) as Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) institutes wide area blackouts in an effort to reduce the risk of wildfire ignition. It seems that PG&E's power line infrastructure is so poorly maintained that the lines in many remote areas are prone to shorting out in high winds or high heat, causing showers of sparks that ignite the tinder-dry wood and vegetation sitting on the forest floor. So PG&E shuts off power to entire sections of its grid and a series of cascading failures begins. Without power cell phone sites (which are not required to have backup power in California) go dark. And of course, with no power there's no internet (either on phones or in homes). Then the remote repeater sites start to go dark as their backup systems - usually a combination of batteries and generators - go dead. What about landlines? Well, since most 'landline' these days is VOIP, that goes dark as soon as the power to everyone's internet modem goes out. The few left with old fashioned conventional landline service are OK for a time, but at some point the fires take out those lines too. Because, you see, even though PG&E is shutting down power over wide areas, their live lines are still sparking and igniting forest fires.

Hollywood screen writers couldn't have crafted a more zany set of interlocking failures involving mother nature and poor human decision making. And don't think for a moment your local politicians and utility owners can't bring the same level of incompetence and mismanagement to your hometown. We saw it in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina and in Puerto Rico in the wake of Maria. In this context California is not an outlier; 'civilized' countries or regions descend into chaos all the time, and no level of investment in hardened communications systems makes them invulnerable.

What's this all have to do with Amateur Radio? Actually, quite a bit. What's happening in California represents a real-world, full on communications blackout. EVERYTHING is down, even the federal government's vaunted 'FirstNet' system was having problems. Amateur Radio infrastructure is not exempt - I'm sure repeater sites were going down right along with the cell sites.

But there IS an Amateur Radio mode that can operate completely off the grid, with zero dependency on local power or other infrastructure. This is the same mode that came into play in Puerto Rico in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria, and in the Bahamas right after Hurricane Dorian earlier this year. The solution is HF using Near Vertical Incidence Skywave (NVIS) antenna configurations. If you need to get a signal up and out of an affected area, but still retain the ability to communicate with the guy just on the other side of the ridge, then NVIS is your best - and often your only - bet.

NVIS Propagation

We'll be discussing more about NVIS in later postings. But for now just understand that 'when all else fails', even our highly touted repeater infrastructure, there is still one mode that can get the signal through - NVIS.

W8BYH out.

All FOGged Up

It's rare that I praise the US federal government. I take the view that the least government is the best, and the only way you could use the word 'least' in describing what we've got here in the good old USofA is 'least effective'. But occasionally they get things right. NASA did a pretty good job with the Apollo moon missions, and the Coast Guard does a good job of keeping pirates from raiding our shores. And back in 2016 the Department of Homeland Security released to the public a neat little document called the National Interoperablility Field Operation Guide version 1.6.1. Or as the Amateur Radio community calls it, the NIFOG.

What is the NIFOG? I'll just quote from the document's introduction:

"The National Interoperability Field Operations Guide (NIFOG) is a technical reference for emergency communications planning and for radio technicians responsible for radios that will be used in disaster response."

In its original format the NIFOG is a pocket-sized guide chock full of extremely useful information that every emergency communicator will need access to in times of real emergency:

• FCC rules for emergency communications
• Federal, state and local interoperability and mutual aid UHF and VHF channels
• Contact phone numbers for key agencies like FEMA and regional Coast Guard offices
• Geeky stuff like RS-232 pin-out conventions, RJ-45 connector wiring standards, IP addressing standards, radio line-of-sight calculation formulas, etc.
• Iridium and INMARSAT usage instructions
• Aviation, marine, SAR and rail channel frequencies and coordination information
• GMRS & FRS frequencies and rules
• HF disaster coordination frequencies
• Automatic Link Establishment (ALE) frequencies
• A pretty good Amateur Radio section that includes the current band plan

Homeland Security makes the NIFOG available in a digital (PDF) and hardcopy format. While the PDF version is easy to get and have available on your computer, I strongly recommend everyone involved with emergency communications get the hard copy version from the US Government Bookstore. It's a pocket sized, spiral bound, waterproof booklet that should be a part of your Go-Kit. Get a copy, take the time to review and understand its contents and bookmark so you can quickly find the relevant sections. Like so many things disaster response related, the worst time to try to become familiar with the NIFOG is when a hurricane is bearing down on your county.

Here's a short video covering the NIFOG (version 1.4) contents. It has a bit of a 'prepper' bent, and the guy who made the video can be a little crude, but he knows what he's talking about. His day job is managing field communications systems for the US Forest Service, and he has published a number of videos on communications support during wildfires.

So get the NIFOG, familiarize yourself with it and always have a copy with you when you deploy. That's an order!

W8BYH out

A Shot Over The Bow

A few days ago, at the Tokyo Hamfest, Icom officially announced their new Icom IC-705 portable radio. Notice I said portable, not mobile. It seems this radio is specifically designed to be taken to the field and used in remote places, not chauffeured around in your car.

Even though the radio was announced just a few days ago the buzz and spin on the internet is at hurricane levels. The responses are either that Icom knocked it out of the park with this radio, or that Icom blew a golden opportunity because of some missing feature(s) or design elements.

This is all based just on speculation and the little information that was released at the Tokyo Hamfest, but we can do some informed speculation based on what we already know, and we can do that because Icom has wisely based this new radio on the proven SDR technology in the hugely popular IC-7300 (which I own and use almost daily).

If we simply take in the known features we get a sense of where this radio is heading:

• HF, 6 meters, 2 meter & 70 cm
• Proven SDR technology
• D-STAR
• Large touchscreen user interface
• Max 10 watts output w/ external battery
• Wideband receive from 1 mhz all the way up to 148 mhz
• Built in GPS and Bluetooth

There are a few things we have to infer given Icom's recent past history with HF radios:

• Sound card interface (every Icom HF rig introduced since the venerable IC-7200 has had a built-in sound card interface so we have to assume this one will, too). If Icom has included a sound card for digial modes that makes this radio a sure winner
• This radio will not enjoy any industry standard protective rating - it's not ruggedized or water resistant. OK, maybe a basic IPX5 rating, which means you can sneeze on it lightly and it'll keep working, but anything heavier... nope

What we do know for sure is that this radio will not have a built-in tuner. While I'm OK with that, I do think it's a serious hiccup on Icom's part. C'mon Icom, if CommRadio can shoehorn a very capable internal tuner into their smaller and lighter CTX-10 then you can do it with this radio. Yes, of course LDG will be right along with a battery powered IC-705 specific tuner, but an internal one is still something very desirable in a portable rig. And spare me the "just use a resonant antenna" crap. This is the real world, and the real world is full of non-resonant or 'almost-but-not-quite-resonant' antennas, and a tuner provides frequency agility and can make portable operation so much more enjoyable.

A few things I saw in the Icom product brochure that caught my eye include:

• The UHF/VHF antenna looks like it has a 6 meter coil. This radio could re-invigorate the concept of 6 meter manpack portable operations. If the antenna is not 6 meter capable I anticipate a lot of folks buying the excellent Yaesu 6 meter antenna that comes with the FT-818
• The use of pre-existing lithium-ion battery packs designed for use with the Icom ID-51 handheld. While I don't think the standard battery pack is any great shakes when it comes to capacity, what it does mean is that it'll be easy for third party manufacturers to design larger capacity snap-in battery packs
• The included microphone is not just a mic, but a speaker mic. Hooray! This is critical for portable mobile operations. The HFPack guys must be in a tizzy over this, because they have to Rube Goldberg an RX audio setup for their commercial radios to work in their manpack setups. I wonder how long it will take for someone to develop an interface cable for the standard US military H-250 handset? I'm guessing about a week

Imagine a MILSPEC H-206 handset (seen here connected
to a pair of PRC-77 radios) hooked up to the new
IC-705

Who is this radio really aimed at? Well first, guys like me who love operating portable. To me hauling a radio to the woods is one of the more enjoyable pastimes in ham radio. And the term 'guys like me' also includes folks who like to do Parks On The Air (POTA), Summits On The Air (SOTA), Islands On The Air (IOTA), and folks who like to do manpack mobile HF (the aforementioned HFPack crowd). There's a huge ready made market for this radio, and if it's a success it'll just draw more operators to these activities.

But this radio is also Icom's shot across the bow of their competitors in this market space, particularly Elecraft, Yaesu and the rising tide of Chinese manufacturers who are coming on strong with offerings like the Xiegu X5105 and the G90. Elecraft and Yaesu in particular have to be sitting up and taking notice. This radio is aimed squarely at the Elecraft KX3, and the IC-705 will certainly give that radio a run for the money, particularly if Icom can bring it in at a low enough cost (below $1,000 street price).

Yaesu has been resting on its laurels in the portable radio world for decades. Its FT-818 and FT-857 designs are ancient by comparison, and Yaesu muffed the design of the FT-891 so badly (discussed in an earlier blog post) that it had to slash the street pricing drastically to get over the bad press. The FT-891 doesn't reflect just a bad design, but also a missed opportunity. The FT-891 was designed specifically to NOT impact sales of the older FT-857 or the new FT-991. As a result Yaesu ended up with a radio full of compromises, not innovative features. Here's hoping the Icom IC-705 forces Yaesu off of their rear ends so that next year at the Tokyo Hamfest we'll be talking about Yaesu's new innovative HF/50/2 meter/70 cm offering.

Regardless, it looks like Icom is about to hit it out of the ballpark with the IC-705. Let the drooling begin.

W8BYH out