For those of you who may not know, the National Traffic System (NTS) consists of a carefully choreographed collection of section, region, and area nets designed to relay messages throughout the US. In a sense it's the second “R” in ARRL. NTS has a long and honorable history and has some of the best operators in the world as its membership.

The recent hurricane season has raised serious doubts for me about the role that NTS plays in the current ham-radio environment. I did not hear a single health-and-welfare message during the disasters. In bygone times, NTS would have been buzzing with activity.

My hands-on experience on the Gulf coast demonstrated a couple of reasons for this lack of traffic. First, responders were discouraged or even prohibited from soliciting such traffic, and non-NTS nets often refused to accept it. (I can understand not accepting incoming H&W traffic if there's no way to deliver it, but having a so-called traffic net refuse traffic because it's not “emergency” demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of the whole concept of prioritizing traffic.) Second, there are other means available to people in the affected areas for getting word out to concerned relatives - at the Red Cross shelter, I observed that residents could check out cell phones and use them as they wished.

NTS is a year-around operation. Regular activity in non-disaster times trains operators and prepares the system for priority traffic in times of disaster. In order to keep the system oiled, routine traffic needs to flow on a daily basis. This supply of routine traffic has been drying up for several years. For example, we used to see radiograms from Navy recruits sending their address home to concerned parents; since this source has dried up, I assume that the Navy has found other means of providing this service. Or maybe the recruits just reach into their pocket now and pull out their cell phone. With the common use of email in the general public, there's little demand for the “Happy birthday Aunt Mary” traffic that used to keep the NTS mechanism running for the 364 days each year when there was no need to relay health-and-welfare traffic.

This leads to a puzzling question: If there's no routine traffic, and there's no priority traffic, then why is there an NTS? In order to answer this question, we need to explore what NTS contributes to the ham-radio community.

The most obvious contribution is the long-haul traffic capability. Having both the system and the operators available in case of emergency has always been the bedrock rationale that justified spending time on NTS, day after day.

NTS is traditionally the place where traffic handlers are trained. I can hear the collective sigh of “We don't need that formal traffic handling stuff.” There are many aspects of traffic handling other than CW procedures, formal message format, and worrying about check counts. Even in VHF tactical communications, the basic need is to get the message through accurately and completely, including addressee, text, and signature. You may not call them “addressee, text, and signature”, but those aspects of the message must be there or you'll find yourself backtracking to find them. While I'm convinced that there's no better place than NTS to learn the basic skills, it's not the only place. Two weeks on the Gulf coast demonstrated to me that hams in general are woefully untrained in tactical communications procedures, but that they learn very quickly in the heat of battle. It would have been nice if more people had better background, and NTS could help with this issue, but then again so could ARES or RACES or even MARS.

Another aspect of NTS that is worthy of consideration is the social one. Checking into nets regularly, learning procedure, and working together towards a common goal is a great way to meet people and build lasting friendships. Such activities bring out the best in the hobby.

Finally, NTS provides a structure that encourages activity. Nets meet at the same time each day, and stations can volunteer to handle specific assignments, all of which motivates us to go into the ham shack and actually get on the air.

NTS is at a turning point. It takes a lot of volunteers and a lot of operating hours to maintain the extensive schedules, and I see the manpower pool shrinking to the point that the system is beginning to creak and groan a bit. There are few new recruits. If this well-oiled machine is allowed to grind to a halt, it will be impossible to put it back together.

If NTS is to continue to exist, new recruits need to be attracted and the old timers need to be retained. There's only one thing that will accomplish this - meaningful traffic in the network. These routine messages could come from the members themselves, but historically NTS participants have been remiss about pumping traffic into the system, and there's little reason to expect this to change. This leaves external forces as the source for NTS revitalization, and the only external force I see that can/will do this is ARRL.

Maybe ARRL has already decided that NTS is an anachronism and not worth saving. After all, I remember when the acronym “BPL” was an award for outstanding work in the traffic-handling community; that's sure not how ARRL uses it these days.

I saved the disclaimers for the end. These are my personal observations, based upon my personal experience in this geographic area, and I'm not speaking for anyone else. I have 40 years of experience with NTS, so it's hard to be objective, but seems to me that either NTS needs to be integrated into today's world or disbanded. I don't have any revitalization ideas that I consider workable, but I hate to think that this great resource should just be allowed to wither away.

It will be interesting to read the comments about this article on eHam, or maybe to observe the lack of them.