Ham radio off the grid

I'm thinking amateur radio might be a valuable skill-set in remote Alaska. I grew up way off-grid in the middle-of-nowhere, Wyoming, but I don't recall any of our distant neighbors out there being an amateur radio enthusiast. One of my dad's cousins had an airplane, but when I as a kid, that was our only possible line of communication with civilization in time of emergency.

Okay, so what about people in some remote homestead cabin calling out for supplies — that is, non-emergency situations? The only way to reach their location is by float plane on a lake. Maybe every month or so, they need a few staples or essentials, so they call on their radio to the pilot that arranges transport. Yeah, this is something I've seen in movies. I'm not sure of how accurate it is.

What would you call the radios they are using? Ham radios or two-way radios? I tried to read up on this a little, but I'm not really sure of the distinction.

2-way radios would be like CBs and other non-licensed radios like FRS.

The amateur bands require a license and opens up lots of different frequencies. I'm not too sure what remote sites in AK use for normal comms but they may be exempt from licensing for specific uses and frequencies on the ham bands. I'll look into it.

An amateur (ham) technician's license is very easy to get but only allows operation on UHF and VHF frequencies, 50mhz and up, and are mostly regulations with some technical knowledge.
General and Extra require quite a bit of theory and knowledge of how electronics works and opens up the HF bands, the ones that can communicate around the world. I have an Extra class and it took me 5 tries to pass. I'm also a certified examiner.
The Morse code requirement has gone away.


No photos.
My handheld is a 4 band Yaesu VX7R (6m, 2m, 1.25m and 70cm), modified to transmit on most all emergency freqs if needed, including commercial flight freqs. The aircraft freqs would allow me to contact a passing airliner on the international emergency frequency in an extreme circumstance since this handheld has 5 watts and will easily transmit 5 miles straight up.
I have 2 dual band Yaesu 8800s, one in each vehicle, modified the same way.
I don't have a big base radio because I like portability.
I have a wire dipole fed with ladder-line connected to a Yaesu FT-857 all mode, all band, set up at home. The radio is very portable and is the one I take along in my camper when I travel and stick in a padded bag along with a Buddipole, solar panel and 2 batteries for the above mentioned SOTA and other off-grid events.
At some point I'll put a screwdriver antenna (probably the Yaesu ATAS 120 to match the radio) on my truck and set up a mount for the 857. Then I can easily plug and play while mobile.

Okay, that makes sense. When I was ground-service supervisor for a regional-airport fixed-base operator (FOB), I often spoke with incoming aircraft via two-way radio to arrange fueling, hangaring, tiedown, ground transportation into town, catering, and so on. There was a protocol for calling, addressing the pilot, and clearing the channel when the conversation was ended. But I was not required to have a radio-operator's license. So that's two-way radio but not ham.

Ed is going to take his HAM test next month.

Where we live, we don't have cell signal and land lines can be sketchy (which we don't have anyway). The only form of outside communication we use is internet (our cell phones work off that).

We'll be able to use the HAM to communicate in case of emergency (such as the floods we got a few years ago).

I asked the ham club and got a lot of responses, most misunderstanding what I was asking and commenting that no, ham bands cannot be used without a license.

I did get the AK emergency frequency which I already knew:
www.w5txr.net/Alaska-Emergency-Frequency.html

Fixed base operations which would cover remote homesteads:
www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/80.387
www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2009-title47-vol5/pdf/CFR-2009-title47-vol5-sec80-701.pdf