Disaster Comm Ohio

Every once in a while, my thoughts turn to the novelty of gathering areal imagery or elevating a wifi or radio repeater using a balloon or dirigible. A number of years ago I was at a Field Day event with COARES (http://www.coares.org/) and they used a weather balloon to hoist up an antenna. It's one those things that keep bouncing around in my head, periodically resurfacing.

How did I get here?

I'm the shyest of amateur radio operators. In the '90s I picked up my technician ticket shortly after it went "no code." There were earlier attempts pick up Morse code, but I didn't have the ear for it-- which is odd, since I have a pretty good ear for other digital communications. After getting my license I didn't do much with it, as my only real interest was in packet and satellites. It's more interesting to me to get things to talk to each other.

Today my twitter stream lit up with the announcement of a cooperation between Dell and the American Red Cross to set up operations centers to manage social media services to prepare and respond to disasters. While it's not a new idea to put a few computers and volunteers in an operations center to help communicate with the public and gather information, this represents a new stage of maturity for social media in meeting the disaster-response mission.