Last night my wife was watching the local news (I always do something else when she watches local news because local news has no content whatsoever. She called me in for a story about a zone of no car alarms.

There was some sort of local shopping center where, for the last year, no one could use their automatic car locks, alarms, or other wireless devices. No one could figure out why this was. The local angle was that they called in some radio amateurs (hams, licensed amateur radio operators) to troubleshoot the reason for the dead zone.

The newslady made a big deal out of their fancy gadgets* and skills as they attempted to figure out the cause of the problem. I was guessing door openers. I was wrong. Turned out to be the anti-theft sensors between the two front doors. The store wouldn’t admit it but within a week, all of the devices that wouldn’t work for a year suddenly started working again.

It was nice to see amateurs on tv. It’s not odd to see them performing a public service on their own time with their own equipment, though. You keep hearing about all of the emergency services being put into place by Homeland Security —-> (Heil!!!) but the only time-tested means of communication during a power failure will be radio.

When the hurricanes hit Florida, some counties’ only means of communication was volunteer amateur radio operators. When the cell phones went down on 9-11, radio didn’t.

Good folks, those hams.

* for anyone interested, the fancy gadgets were two homemade yagis for direction-finding. Picture a foot long stick with a few hangers through it, like a mini tv antenna. It was pretty funny.