Give up on emcomm? by dan kb6nu

a fellow wrote:

Our radio club has had a pretty solid relationship with our county’s department of public safety for many years. That has since begun to dry up now that they have a new communication system that seems to check off all their boxes. As a result, they aren’t including us in real emergency situations like they used to and they’re reluctant to participate in our emergency tests where we practice. In short, I think the marriage is about over.

I’m wondering how other EMCOMM-based clubs find themselves these days in terms of their relationships with local agencies. Is the love for amateur radio EMCOMM drying up everywhere? If it’s not in your area, can you describe how it’s going and what your club is doing to keep the idea alive?

I’m asking because as a member of our leadership team, I’m very close to recommending we just sever ties altogether in a formal manner and drop to one drill a year or every other year. The amount of energy our team puts into organizing one of these just isn’t being reflected by the partners we’re trying to serve and the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.

The responses to this post are all over the map. There were plenty who agreed with the original poster:

• “EMCOMM has been slowly dying for a long time.”
• “I work in the agency that manages emergency systems for my city and ham radio emergency participation is a joke to them.”
• “Ham radio as a service is dead. Let’s all move on …”

At the other end of the spectrum, there were these comments:

• “This is the opposite of my experience here in a rural, agricultural county in California. I don’t get a sense that this is a trend.”
• “We have 30+ members who have taken the ICS training and understand what our place ought to be: that is, assist when requested and stay out of the way.”
• “Our local Emergency Management department utilizes Amateur Radio during emergency activations in several areas.”

Even at the positive end of the spectrum, it’s clear that emergency management has gotten way more sophisticated over the past couple of decades. For us to continue to serve, we are also going to have be more sophisticated. I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Amateur radio needs something like AMSAT for emergency communications. That is to say an organization that is advancing the state of the art in amateur radio communications.

Along with that, we have to participate more fully with the emergency management community. That means going to their conferences and publishing papers at these conferences and in their publications. Maybe I’m not close enough to what’s happening, but I just don’t see that.

Along those lines, I think that while our Public Information Coordinators are doing a good job of getting amateur radio on the nightly news and into newspapers, someone should be concentrating more on raising our profile in the emergency management community. Most of the people watching the news aren’t the people who are going to be making the decisions on how big or how small a role that amateur radio is going to play in their emergency management plans.