-Ian.

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cidR8&ncidR8&e=2&u=/ap/ 20030819/ap_on_hi_te/blackout_ham_radio Ham Radios Came to Rescue in Blackout Tue Aug 19, 1:14 PM ET By STEPHEN SINGER, Associated Press Writer

HARTFORD, Conn. – When technology failed on a massive scale last week, some old-fashioned broadcasting stepped into the breach as ham radio operators took to the airwaves to reach emergency workers.

For millions of people in the Northeast and Midwest, the Aug. 14 outage took access to e-mail and the Internet with it. Landline and cellular telephones were jammed by a crush of calls.

But the ham radio, which came into being in the World War I era, connected firefighters and police departments, Red Cross workers and other emergency personnel during the most extensive blackout in the Northeast since 1977.

Ham operators are not dependent on a server or cell tower, and with battery backups can operate when grids can’t.

“When everything else fails, the ham radio is still there,” said Allen Pitts, a ham operator in New Britain. “You can’t knock out that system.”

The radios are operated by a network of volunteers organized by the Newington-based American Radio Relay League.

Ham radio’s importance won renewed recognition after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. ARRL won a federal Homeland Security grant of nearly $182,000 to train amateur radio operators in emergency operations to help during terrorist attacks.

“It’s incredible the differences you’re seeing, the large cadre of people who know what they’re doing,” Pitts said. “It’s making a major difference.”

Tom Carrubba, a coordinator for ARRL in New York City’s five boroughs and two counties on Long Island, said volunteers went to work immediately after power went down Thursday afternoon.

“In five minutes guys were on the air with the Red Cross and Office of Emergency Management,” he said.

During other disasters, such as severe weather, ARRL volunteers and coordinators activate telephone trees, Carrubba said. On Thursday, they instead hit their assigned frequency or staffed an emergency operations center.

In the New York-Long Island region, with a population of nearly 10 million, about 100 ham radio operators handled the situation, Carrubba said. Some volunteers headed to a Red Cross headquarters or shelter, fire department, or hospital, he said. One hospital was temporarily out of power and ARRL volunteers provided communications to ambulances until electricity was restored.

Carrubba estimated that operators handled 800 to 1,000 communications from Thursday afternoon until early Friday.

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On the Net:

http://www.arrl.org

By Russ Mitchell

This article was originally published on SmartMoney Select on 8/22/02. NOT EVEN A PROMISING pedigree was enough to spare Agere Systems (NYSE:AGR.A – News) the indignities of the telecom meltdown.

Last week, the Lucent Technologies (NYSE:LU – News) spinoff unveiled plans to dump its optoelectronics business, close almost all of its manufacturing plants and lay off 4,000 — a third of its work force. The decision, though drastic, was all but unavoidable in light of the state of the industry and the health of the broader economy. What’s curious, though, has been the stock market’s reaction to it all.

Agere’s shares have been hovering between $1.50 and $1.70, off a 52-week high of $6.30. The price blipped up on the announcement, but only a tad. In other words, the market seems to be saying the news is practically neutral; that huge layoffs, plant shutdowns and a dramatic shift in strategy will leave the company worth about what it was worth before the announcement.

Clearly, that’s absurd. More likely, investors want to believe in Agere, but they don’t trust it yet. And who can blame them? Until early 2001, Agere was the microelectronics group at Lucent. Lucent spun it off because Lucent’s finances were in deep crud, just as AT&T (NYSE:T – News) spun off Lucent in 1996 because AT&T was in trouble.

Agere, for its part, came away with a potentially strong chip business and great technology — its roots go back to Bell Laboratories, and Agere is blessed with 6,000 patented technologies covering optics, integrated circuits and semiconductor manufacturing processes and technology.

But it also came away with horribly bloated operations. In the spring of 2001, Agere had 18,500 employees; by the end of next year that number should be down to 7,200. Lucent, in desperate straits, stuck Agere’s managers and shareholders with $2.5 billion in debt. Lucent also passed on a legacy of strategic mismanagement, which left the company saddled with semiconductor fabrication plants (known as fabs) that companies like Agere can no longer afford.

Credit Agere management for stripping the company down to its essentials. It’s closing all but one of its fabs, turning instead to contract fabrication outfits in Asia, as do most midsize and smaller chip companies. That means not only capital savings, but also savings of $100 million in annual process R&D costs. The optoelectronics business that it’s exiting — chiplike devices that route traffic on long-haul fiber-optic networks — may have brought Agere profits in the future, but it’s a business that may not recover for years. Agere can direct that investment elsewhere.

So where’s the focus going forward? Three chip markets, from fastest to slowest growing:

Wireless networks, including the fast-growing technology known as 802.11 (a.k.a. WiFi), and cellular telephones. Agere is a close No. 2 behind Intersil (NASDAQ:ISIL – News) in WiFi. Among its cell-phone customers is Samsung, which uses Agere chips in its new phones for 2.5G networks. Agere is also a major player in the flourishing cell-phone market in China.

High-density storage. Agere makes three chips essential to storage: One amplifies the signals picked up by the read head in the hard drive; another converts those amplified signals to digital; and a third controls the hard-drive motor. New chips combine the last two functions. Hard drives are commodities, but the chips that control them are not. Agere counts the four largest hard-drive manufacturers as major customers.

Multiservice network solutions. Marketing verbiage for chips that process data in networks. Customers here include Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO – News), Riverstone (NASDAQ:RSTN – News) and Huawei, also known as the “Chinese Cisco.”

Clearly, Agere’s prospects depend on a capital-spending recovery. The company will lose money this year. But Greg Waters, senior vice president of strategy and business development at Agere, says the company is committed to paring costs to the point where it could break even on current revenues — about $500 million a quarter. “Even if the economy doesn’t improve, even if our business doesn’t improve, our cost structure will allow us to make money,” he says.

Not much money, of course, but Waters says that after breaking even, as much as 70% of new revenues could fall right down to the bottom line. In other words, when the economy turns around, Agere earnings will be positioned to take off, and midyear 2002 would prove to have been a great time to get into the stock.

Of course Agere, which is ranked as the No. 1 vendor of communications chips by Gartner, must execute — particularly with companies like Intel (NASDAQ:INTC – News) paying more attention to those very same communications chips. And Agere’s Lucent legacy gives cause for pause. But Waters, who came from Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN – News) three years ago, says two-thirds of top management joined the company within the past two years. Another good sign.

Adding his two billion cents to the stock-options debate this week, Bill Gates said expensing options would have little negative effect on innovation.

In a recent column I argued that forcing young start-up companies to expense options would weigh down their net income, extend their periods of losses, make it harder for them to raise capital and, in the end, stifle innovation. I’m hardly the only one making that argument.

If Gates means that expensing options won’t slow innovation at huge, established companies such as Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT – News), he’s probably right. But if smaller, more innovative companies find it tougher to raise money, then it lowers the odds that new breakthrough technologies will emerge to challenge the giants…like Microsoft.

Russ Mitchell is a veteran technology journalist based in San Francisco.

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Some Early Mobiles Reportedly Pose Brain Tumor Risk Thu Aug 22, 1:09 PM ET

By Anna Peltola

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Long-term users of some first generation cell phones face up to 80 percent greater risk of developing brain tumors than those who did not use the phones, a new Swedish study shows.

The study, published in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention, looked at 1,617 Swedish patients diagnosed with brain tumors between 1997 and 2000, comparing them with a similar control group without brain tumors.

Researchers found that those who had used Nordic Mobile Telephone handsets had a 30 percent higher risk of developing brain tumors than people who had not used that type of phone, particularly on the side of the brain used during calls. For people using the phones for more than 10 years, the risk was 80 percent greater.

“Our present study showed an increased risk for brain tumors among users of analog cellular telephones. For digital cellular phones and cordless phones the results showed no increased risk overall within a five-year latency period,” the study said.

Two major mobile phone manufacturers disputed the findings of an increased risk of cancer.

The world’s biggest mobile producer, Finland’s Nokia ( news – web sites) Oyj, which still produces two models of phones working in the Nordic Mobile Telephone standard, said scores of other studies conducted on the health effects of cell phones showed no evidence of health hazards for users.

“There have been close to 200 studies done on different areas of mobile phones and in the light of those and the way the scientific evidence is, there is no health risk in using mobile phones,” Marianne Holmlund, communications manager at Nokia Phones, told Reuters Thursday.

Mikael Westmark, a spokesman for Sweden’s Telefon AB LM Ericsson ( news – web sites), which used to make Nordic Mobile Telephone handsets, said: “The study and the conclusions it reaches differs from at least three other studies in the past in several highly regarded scientific journals. None of these studies found a connection between mobile phones and cancer.”

DEVELOPED TO SERVE NORDIC COUNTRIES

The Nordic Mobile Telephone network was initially developed to serve the Nordic countries, starting operations in the early 1980s, but then became popular in Russia and the Baltic countries.

It is still used in more than 40 countries, but has been overtaken in several countries by the Global System for Mobile Communications, which is due to be gradually replaced by rapid third-generation mobile networks.

Analog Nordic Mobile Telephone phones have been in operation for 20 years, making it possible to study the longer-term impact of microwave exposure to their users, but researcher Kjell Hansson Mild said it was too early to draw conclusions on the currently widely used digital Global System for Mobile Communications phones.

“Nothing can be said about GSM at this stage,” said Hansson Mild, professor at the National Institute for Working Life and co-leader of the study.

“These are tumors that develop very slowly, and GSM does not have users who have been using it for 10 years,” he told Reuters. (Additional reporting by Jan Strupczewski)

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