Amateur radio replaces cellphones following Indian terror attack

When al-Qaeda-linked terrorists attacked trains in Mumbai, India, on July 11th, the city's cellular telephone network failed. But there was an alternative that residents could turn to in the person of the city's ham radio operators. Graham Kemp, VK4BB, of the WIA News has the details:

Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay is where the attack occurred. The blasts on several commuter trains killed 181 people and injured another 890. A little known terrorist group the Lashkar-e-Qahhar, which claims ties to al-Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for the blasts.

But if part of the terrorists' plan was to cause panic due to lack of personal communications, the bad guys failed - and failed miserably. The reason: Ham radio was there to step in when the phones went out.

According to the Thursday, July 13th edition of India Business News as reported on IBNlive.com, as word of the attacks spread across Mumbai, the first reaction of citizens was to reach for the cellphone and ring up the loved ones. And with almost 9 million phones simultaneously fighting for a small patch of bandwidth, the cellular networks all crashed.

With mobile phones totally inoperative, it was the turn of a new set of people to fill the communications gap. The city's corps of ham radio operators.

According to the news report, the local ham radio community was more than ready for the challenge. Radio amateurs all across Mumbai took to the airwaves using hand held and mobiles. Hams not only passed health and welfare messages locally and world-wide. They also helped government agencies pick up information on what was happening across
the city.

Zyros Zend, VU2ZRS, is a radio amateur living in Mumbi. He told IBN Live that radio amateurs in India consider it a moral duty to sign on to the air when disaster strikes. He said that many Mumbai hams carry their hand-held radios with them and rush to the nearest spot of crisis when an alert goes out.

At this time, it's not known how many of India's hams responded to this emergency. As previously reported, emergency planners in Mumbai recently invited hams and cellular phone service providers to the meeting as both are seen to play a major role in disseminating information.

At that time several Standard Operating Procedure papers were penned and the government said that it would enlist ham radio operators to the cause. This, to have alternate channels of communication ready to deal with any situation.

This time the hams were there before the government even had to ask.

Graham Kemp, VK4BB
Source: Amateur Radio Newsline, WIA News

As a nice postscript to this otherwise tragic story.
As a result of the swift response by India's hams to this terrorist attack, it caused the news reports to coine a new expression to describe the hobby.. Now in Mumbai, India the three letters H-A-M has come to mean: 'Help All Mankind'.

IBNLive.com, Hindu Daily, Bloomberg News, Malaysia Star, Hindustan Times

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