[aprssig] SOS Radio

[Robert Bruninga]

By now you may be hearing about the concept of
SOS Radio, where the public is encouraged to use
channel 1 tone 0 for emergency calls to monitoring
HAMS.  We tried to get somethign like this going
years ago.  In our opinion, the number one sentence 
that should be included in ANY such announcement or 
solicitation to the  public or in instructions on how 
to use it is something like this:

"Unlike cell phones, radios share a common channel and
must have callsigns inorder to distinguish who is saying
what to whom.  Callers must identify themselves with
a unique callsign.  We suggest your home address or
your initials and digits of your home address.  This allows 
efficient two-way communications on a shared channel, 
and the abilitiy for call-back when needed."

Radio channel chatter between anonymous parties multipled
thousands-fold will be useless without repeatable-identification.
I was going to suggest they use their phone number, but
that might give up too much privacy and could be terribly
abused.  Actualy for emergency use, I would think that
FULL STREET ADDRESS might be the best callsign for this
particular SOS application.  Because in one phrase, it
not only gives voice ID, but also location.  Both of which
are very important.

de WB4APR, Bob