I think I need to follow my own advice and just get to know my neighbors better. I know some, but not all, and don't really see them all that much. Still, it's good to have SOME kind of foundation, even if just a short term, localized event occurs.
A couple of years ago, the neighboring town had a young man that was a fireman that was involved in arson. By the time the smoke cleared, he had burned down at least 12 different places. No one wanted to tell on him because everyone was friends and the places he burned down were mostly all dilapidated old houses and abandoned dwellings.
One building he burned down was a paid event. The fire had a little something to do with drugs I think, but the owner was exonerated while the arsonist was arrested and sent to prison.
I went to that town and put on a demonstration and presentation of amateur radio.
I even gave away two 10 / 11 meter antenna's and put up two towers free of charge.
I realized that in an emergency, the fire department was going to be busy doing its own thing.
The county agent was going to be stranded, since most floods closes off the highway in both directions and navigation around the town is very limited except by boat when flooding occurs. I offered to give a Technician Class License class and even offered a ham in a day class.
The fire chief rolled his eyes while everyone else paid no attention to what I said.
I explained how I would build a 440 repeater for them to use and I would conduct a daily net with check in's where each person could say hi and communicate with their neighbors and if they saw something during the day, they could call others to look out their windows or call for help. I did not get one interested person out of the whole town. I was offered the use of their town hall for one day for a VE test session - no classes. When the county did the SET with the amateurs - we were denied the use of the hall because there was a wedding pre scheduled.
This is after FEMA invested thousands of dollars into rehabilitating this building and supplying them with a emergency generator and giving them aid in the form of cots and bedding and food and supplies for their emergency shelter.
The assumption that anyone would want to get involved in Amateur Radio, much beyond wanting to use it as a telephone when their cell phone does not work, so they can call loved ones is ridiculous.
No one wants to be a ham as long as they have a working cell phone - where all they have to do is pay the bill.
No one wants to be a ham if to be a ham they have to buy a couple of thousand dollars worth of equipment and participate in amateur radio activities.
Many of the people that became hams 10 - 20 - and 30 years ago is letting their license expire on purpose - just because they never were hams and they don't want to be hams with what amateur radio has to offer today.
Most times it had something more to do with friends that talked on the CB radio that were looking for a quiet - legal place to talk. Or friends that talked on the ham radio that lost their members and now has no one to talk to - because they never called CQ before in their lives - just talked to each other on one frequency and never did anything as a group such as Field Days.
Or the old group died off and there was no one to give the VE test sessions and no one was willing to travel 50 miles to take a test so they just left their licenses expire.
The ones that bothers me the most is fathers and sons and husbands and wives.
They just wanted to talk to each other and when one died, the other just left their license expire.
You see none of this is conducive to having an active amateur radio community.
All these people did was take what they wanted for themselves.
In an emergency, these people are not the ones that participates in amateur radio type activities - such as manning a station at the hospital, at the fire house, at the ambulance, at the police station.
The more sophisticated the public service radio gets, the harder it is to keep it online and working after a event. Where as amateur radio is so simple - even if part of it fails, as long as we can talk simplex, we can still communicate. Does this make any sense.
In order to be an effective communicator - you first have to know how to get a signal on the air. It isn't as simple as programming a walkie talkie and talking.
It isn't as simple as throwing a wire in a tree and talking either.
If a person is too busy hanging out with their other punk biker friends, they are not going to have time to sit home in front of a radio and talk to a bunch of old geezers, or want to learn about something as obsolete as radio.
