I'm seeing a lot in the news about deploying Starlink to areas affected by Hurricane Helene. Has there been any use of AREDN in the affected area?
KN0O
KN0O
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But, look at costs for say a county EMA office that has to communicate with 9 locations (fire departments, warming shelters, etc) in an emergency:
10x Starlink dishes - $4990 - much more for their pro models
10x monthly service costs Minimum of $140 a month per site, up to $500 a month for highest tier, $16,800 a year min.
That's $22k for 1 year
You could put a Ubiquiti LiteBeam M5 and a MikroTik hAP ac lite (I think the lowest cost supported components right now) on a site for $115
x10 that's $1150 with no monthly fees. Pretty impressive for a whole county emergency data plan...
And yet, doesn't seem to have happened.
Cheaper than my Iridium voice plan ($60) plus you get full speed internet... hmmm....
I don't see having enough Starlinks available to make a difference if we have region wide internet failure from our expected earthquake. And internet at one location won't get coms through better than radio will. A bad situation would be some folks thinking we all have regular email when only they do.
To boot, I don't want to depend on a system I can't put my hands on and fix myself. Starlink could be subject to cyber attack, denial of service, a low orbit EMP, or Elon Musk simply making a decision on a whim to throttle service or deny it to a geographic area, or tripling the billing if it's the only ISP possible for several months time.
I'd rather have a system under local control like AREDN. I would consider using Starlink in an extended outage to forward Health and Welfare traffic however. Ed
Starlink is only a few years old and has.
Why? How can we change this?
From my perspective, immediately after Ike, Ian, and Helene, and in order;
water, food, clothing, evacuation,...,assessment.
It seems to me that evacuation is not in the disaster playbook.
It seems to me that shelter-house management should include
evacuating folks to family, friends, or church groups outside of the disaster area.
If we could set up an AREDN link to a PBX, folks could call for their own evacuation assistance
and welfare notification to family/friends.
73, Chuck
I was just surprised to see it hasn't been used yet for its intended purpose, I figured it had...
Even meshtastic was put to use in the recent disasters.
The evacuation assistance phone is an interesting idea that I can mention in my presentation.
Thank you
People in general, no matter if at a served agency or people impacted by a disaster don't want to do two things;
1 Learn anything new
2 Depend on someone else ... unless it is absolutely completely the only and last possible option
So ... AREDN is new (to em managers and no one in the public actually cares) so there is a built in reluctance to overcome
And more importantly ... people DO NOT want to have to rely on such as crazy idea as amateur radio operators to send their messages for them. This is crucial ... folks do not want to use us amateurs no mater if we are on radio, on AREDN, or any other mode. They want their own cell phone and don't want to have to depend on anyone else or change their behavior. Until ... there is ABSOLUTELY NO OTHER OPTION and then they will complain that no one is providing communications and it's (fill in the blank with a political statement) fault that there is no cell service or other miracle.
So ... the challenge is to promote AREDN within the agencies and individuals in our communities that have a realistic view of post disaster response, and get it built anyway. That way it is in place to serve those who don't want to know about it by those of us who plan to be available. AREDN isn't needed, until it is needed.
It may be kind of a stretch, but definitely within technical capability.