Amateur Radio Station
at the
National Hurricane
Center
WX4NHC Ham Radio Club Emergency Communications
helps
the largest Haiti Earthquake Medical Field hospital.
The WX4NHC Ham Radio Club Coordinators, Julio Ripoll WD4R and
John McHugh K4AG, at the request of the University of Miami
Miller School of Medicine and Project Medishare
organized and coordinated the deployment and operations of equipment and volunteer operators
to provided International and Local Emergency Communications for their
Field Hospital in Port-au-Prince Haiti.
This is the largest Field Hospital with 240 beds and more than 120
Doctors and Nurses helping critically injured people.
They have already treated more than 20,000 people as of May 1st and continue to
help hundreds of people each day.
This Ham Radio Mission was the largest and longest formal International
Deployment of American Ham Radio Operators into a disaster area in the last two
decades.
WX4NHC Ham Radio Club
has installed two complete HF/VHF/UHF/Winlink/EchoLink radio stations with multiple antennas
at both the university's Haiti Field Hospital and the University's Miami Haiti
Command Center to support this vital humanitarian medical mission.
Volunteer teams of Ham Radio/MARS Radio Operators have been deployed on a weekly
basis to operate
the station in Haiti for 5 weeks and we have incurred expenses beyond
club our savings and the initial equipment grant.
This Medical Mission
has saved lives because of the emergency communications provided by these dedicated
volunteer Amateur Radio / MARS Radio Operators who have made personal sacrifices to take
off from their work/business, pay their travel expenses to Miami, take multiple
vaccines and malaria prophylaxis treatment, carry a hundred pounds of equipment
and supplies to spend a week as 2-man teams to provide these vital communications.
The Haiti UM Field Hospital Ham Radio station has been one
of the best examples of communications interoperability and cooperation by different agencies
and organization that we have seen by connecting multiple
agencies and functions that were once not able to talk directly to each other.
For example: UM Field Hospital Haiti at Port-au-Prince airport compound to USNS Comfort
Hospital ship, coordinating Medivac and critical patient transports, Field
Hospital Haiti to
airport terminal to coordinate arrivals and cargo transfers, Field Hospital
Haiti to other nearby
Medical Centers and Missions allowing Field Hospital Haiti Doctors to consult directly to their
counterparts. We are also providing relay and paging functions on UHF for the
Doctors that are using low power FRS/GMRS Walkie Talkies.
All this is addition to our primary mission of providing international HF
communications backup from the Field Hospital in Haiti to the university's
Command Center in Miami
in case of failure of the satellite link.
Haiti Pictures by Louis Cruz, N4LDG
Our thoughts and prayers are with those who have been affected by
the Earthquake.
