Nothing beats a dummy load for perfect SWR across all bands.

"Ich heil mich selbst."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca_stuV9SmM

What causes a bit of confusion here is those people we sometimes get who ask about disconnecting their gear in case of lightning, and who have no ground system. "Hey guys, I'm gonna skip the ground system and just disconnect the coax from my radio when I hear thunder, and leave the coax lying on the table". In that case, disconnecting might indeed be making things worse since instead of their radio going up in smoke, they start a fire on their desk. Or not. It becomes pretty unpredictable.

As already answered, if you have a good common ground system where the antenna feed lines, and all other conductors already are connected to ground, then disconnecting the gear inside would be slightly better than leaving them connected - much like if you put the gear in a faraday box to protect against EMP, you want an insulating layer/gap between the surface of the box and the protected equipment. The gap on its own does nothing to prevent lightning damage, it's the box/common ground system around it that does actual the protecting.

The 7000 is a great radio, I've used it myself, but the user interface is pretty complicated, which is perhaps to be expected from such a feature rich radio in form factor that's made to be put in a car. The KX3 user interface on the face of it seems much more intuitive.

No, due to cost and weather. The panel is typically mounted on a south facing wall or on a roof mount that points almost vertically to the south. This means that the system produces less total power through the year, but is optimized for producing as much power as possible in the Easter holiday and the autumn hunting season. Since the summers are so bright, you won't need much lighting in the summer anyway, so all the power can be used for TV and radio, and perhaps refrigeration. Refrigeration is not needed in winter, since it's freezing outside anyway.

Part of my degree deals with how design decisions and implementation bugs lead to both spontaneous faults and exploitable vulnerabilities.

I agree with you that it would not be wise to discuss publicly in detail how you'd attack your own system.

Welfare traffic, and perhaps some priority official HF traffic on NVIS and long distances seem like the most needed capabilities, but it would not be a good idea to pretend that "system A can never fail, because we paid X USD on it, so we'll have no plans to deal with it if it stops working".

If the handsets crash, or some other fault causes overloading of the system with junk data, you wouldn't need hardware failures before the system is affected.
The digital trunked systems are well thought out and tested, but they are also complex.
If terrorists wanted to disrupt communications during an attack or something, they wouldn't need nuclear bombs, but could merely use jammers in the area, or perhaps exploit some 0-day vulnerability on the digital side of things. Of course, they could also jam amateur communications, but this would introduce more frequency that they would need to hit.

Remember "zenki" is the guy who thinks that if you take the final PA circuit out of an acceptable radio and put it in a detachable box, it has suddenly become a horrible CB splatterbox. Unless it's 20 watts, because then it's perfect and all the radio you will ever need.

Oh, I see. By the tone of your previous posts, I thought you meant that official planning and traning shouldn't take place, but that the amateurs should just sit at home training for emergencies with NTS drills and the like, and only get in touch with agencies in need after the actual emergency happens. As you said now, it's not how it should be done even if it's a step up from no training at all.

When Emcomm groups offer their services to served agencies, a part of that relationship should be to offer suggestions for how routines, forms, and procedures can be improved, and how new developments in amateur radio can improve things. Better standards and a higher quality of training is a good thing, and those volunteers who think it's too much effort can volunteer for an agency with lower standards, but it's not good if the new standards actually are worse than the old.

Actually solar panels can be a viable option for summer houses and cabins in the high north, like in Alaska or northern Norway, since there's almost 24 hours of sunlight. It's not economical if grid power is available though, since we don't have net metering and electricity prices are the lowest in summer anyway.

Here's a neat idea that I've seen Bob WB4APR use in his grid-tied solar system: His system of panels is wired to deliver about 300 volts DC to the grid-tie inverter. If grid power goes out, the grid-tie inverter stops delivering AC power, but the DC from the panels is still available. Since many consumer switch mode power supplies will work on DC input power, and are made for both 110V and 230V rms systems, he has wired a couple of DC outlets so that he can plug his electronics in and use them straight from solar if the grid goes out. Of course he won't be running any linear power supplies or AC motors without an inverter, but it's something people planning a grid-tie system might consider.

The reason I quoted that specific part of the sentence, was to point out that although the two of us agree about the "IF" question, as would the vast majority of people, there are a few vocal internet posters who do NOT agree with us about that. It is an issue for them. The post I replied to for example.

On the HOW issue, I don't think our posts said the same thing. Incorporating fallback options in an official plan doesn't suddenly make the plan, or the fallback option, worse - as long as it leaves room for the unexpected. It's not like amateur radio will magically stop working as a fallback option because it's mentioned in an official plan or the volunteers have trained for similar situations before.

If there's needs that the served agencies don't feel are met by the NTS, then either the NTS has to adapt, an alternative system must be used, or the served agency and the volunteers must work to find out how the NTS can meet the agency's needs.

If this has failed, then I don't see it as an argument against building relationships between volunteers and served agencies, or against exercising, but rather that the relationship has to be improved.
Precisely the point I was trying to make, I think. If you call for untrained volunteers, and poorly specify what their mission is, this is the sort of thing that can happen.
Since you're speaking in favor of both emcomm and NTS self-training, and have actually been active in it, I don't think you share the motivation of those posters who are completely against emcomm and training. If that were the case those people would also be discussing HOW relationships with served agencies could be formed and improved, what requirements volunteers can fulfill, which served agencies are better to volunteer for, rather than saying that emcomm shouldn't happen at all (the "IF" question above).

I think I'm closer to understand your position now. Thanks for answering. 73.

Actually no, we do not laugh at NGOs and private individuals and corporations providing ambulances, defibrilators, private aircraft, private boats, privately owned climbing and caving gear and other gear with them to a search-and-rescue effort or emergency. Sometimes these privately owned assets are leased by the government, while other times they are provided by volunteers for free.

Guns and weapons are a whole different issue.
Hopefully local tactical radios should be the last things that would fail, but what if the failure of those radios is the actual communications emergency? Cell phones would would be the likely first fallback solution, before having to do things like put a ham volunteer in every mobile unit or just speed-training the emergency responders to use a ham radio or an old analog public service radio.

They should, but controller failure isn't the only failure mode. The handsets could crash, for example.

I think some neighborhoods use FRS and CB as local commuications and let hams work as a bridge between the neighbourhood and the outside world. I also like to bring CB and PMR446 (European version of FRS) to field day or other events so that those who are not licensed yet can run around with a radio of their own in addition to them getting to use the amateur bands under supervision.

In more formal emergency operations for a served agency, there might be air band radios, marine radios (if they're at the coast), perhaps satellite phones, and the public safety radios that the emergency services use every day available in the communications trailer or operations center. Whether you have the training and authorization to use them is often a matter between the served agency who holds the license and the employees or volunteers themselves. Some places may train their volunteers as fully fledged dispatchers, other places the volunteer runs the amateur radio equipment and the regular dispatcher runs the equipment that they're used to.

With the new digital trunked public safety radio systems, there is a possibility of issuing a few of the volunteers with public service handsets. Thanks to call groups and encryption, these handsets can be used to communicate between public safety and lead volunteers, without worrying that the volunteers can eavesdrop on unrelated communications. Here in Norway, it's planned that leaders in the Red Cross, the radio league, the rescue dog volunteers, Home Guard commanders, and other such organizations will get a TETRA handset which the police can reach them on in case the phone system fails. This doesn't mean that every member of those services will get a TETRA set - they'll keep their existing systems, and use TETRA for coordinating with police/fire/EMS.

That is like calling everone who uses a phone in their daily job a "telecom professional". No dobut the professional emergency responders know how to effectively communicate within their department or with mutual aid services, but it's not a given that they know how to establish alternative communications if their digital trunked system or the phone system stops working. The radio amateurs are there to re-establish communications, while the service techs fix the underlying problem and the first responders get on with their job with as little disruption as possible.
Would you say if their channelized trunked radio system stops working, is it also like suddenly not being able to breathe?
Mountain rescue and civil air patrol are hobbies useful in emergencies. Can any random police officer or fire fighter home in on an ELT, or rescue a person who's fallen down on a ledge under an overhang?
I would be happy to see the load bearing vests and camouflage pants get thrown out but I would be careful about throwing out the reflective vests and ID badges too. The last thing you want to be doing in an emergency is running around asking "who is that guy, and who is that guy, and why is he there"? In a disaster area, it strikes me as somewhat impractical to have plainclothes volunteer fire fighters, plainclothes paramedics, plainclothes Red Cross volunteers, plainclothes Salvation Army volunteers, plainclothes amateur radio volunteers, mixed in with victims, evacuees, rubberneckers, looters and journalists - all in white unmarked vans. We even have a thread here on eHam started by a guy who wanted to go "under cover" with his radio to "shadow" public service events or something.

On the sliding scale between
- A whacker in a fake police uniform and carrying a gun
- A whacker in a load bearing vest and a uniform that looks suspiciously like a police officer
- A trained amateur volunteer in reflective vest saying "Radio volunteer" or something like that
- A trained amateur volunteer that can't be told apart by sight from a group of evacuees or bystanders
- An untrained volunteer who shows up spontaneously and demands that you put him to work saving the world with an HT
- A would-be volunteer who is sitting at home hoping to get called out, but nobody in the incident command knows that s(he) exists and is capable of.
- An weirdo who sneaks around with a radio to "shadow" the incident without your knowledge
I think somewhere around the reflective vests area is actually the best place to be, and it seems that's what the norm already is. A few vocal voices hate the out of control whackers so much that they say they prefer plainclothes or even untrained volunteers to trained volunteers in reflective vests - and that sort of mentality is actually fascinating to me. It reminds me of the extreme doomsday preppers on one side, and on the other side those people who refuse to keep food for more than one day in the house and say they hope that they're the first to die if a disaster strikes.

Unless you have a metal floor in a wooden house or something, I'd avoid an indoor vertical. Could it be that the antenna is severely detuned by nearby objects or something? (Like house wiring, metal siding, etc.)

You can still make contacts on CW and PSK-31 on something like that, if you get it to match, but if you want to have a better indoor antenna, get a dipole up in the attic or even a wooden ceiling. I've been lucky enough to even work SSB DX on my FT-817 on ceiling dipoles.