The International Health Service has been sending volunteer medical/dental teams into remote areas of Honduras, Central America, for 40 years. These teams provide needed medical care to impoverished populations, often in remote, isolated villages that may require riverboats, small planes, or hours riding in 4 x 4 trucks to reach.
Communications from these villages is always a challenge, having no internet, no cellular service, and often no electricity. Once on site, we have to establish communications with the outside world for emergencies, security, medical consultations, patient transfers, coordination of travel and logistic support, as well as health and welfare messages to family members back home.
Each team has an amateur radio operator embedded who sets up and operates an HF Winlink communications station. The beauty of using Winlink is that from an area with no working internet (like the middle of the jungle) it can send and receive emails that are delivered to anyone in the world via their normal internet email system. It's invisible to the recipient that the first leg of the email's trip is actually transmitted by HF radio.
This year, I deployed in a dual role as my IHS team's engineer and radio operator to the most remote villages in the western mountains of Honduras. After a grueling 12-hour bus ride to transport our team, medical equipment and supplies to the general area, then another 4-hour trek through mountain “roads” with potholes the size of Volkswagens, we finally arrived at our first village. Since darkness was approaching, the first priority was to set up our sleeping area for the night. We sleep on the floor in individual tents in any available structure we can find in each village, moving every 2 or 3 days to the next village to again set up and operate a medical clinic.
I needed to report our location and that our team had arrived safely. Since it was too dark to scout outside for suitable antenna locations, I unpacked my battery-operated FX-4CR transceiver (20 watts SSB, 10 watts digital) and set up an indoor magnetic loop antenna. Using Winlink VARA HF, I connected with the N5TW RMS 1200 miles away and was able to successfully send my traffic.
I must explain that during the times of IHS operations, N5TW aims his phenomenal stacked, phased beam antenna array connected to his Winlink RMS station towards Honduras, specifically to support our communications. During our travels from village to village, even with low power and a magnetic loop antenna indoors, I was always able to connect to N5TW on 15 meters from early morning into the night, even when the propagation forecast charts indicated in the red with zero path quality. I came equipped with an FT-891 full power rig, PACTOR modem, and several different antenna systems but since the simple QRP setup was perfectly adequate, all the other equipment just stayed in the Pelican case throughout the deployment.
The Winlink system was invaluable to our operations. Besides handling our routine communications, we had an unexpected event that required the evacuation of one of our doctors from the middle of nowhere back to the U.S. This required a lot of communication and coordination. This year, hams who served on other IHS medical teams throughout Honduras included: N5YZJ, KC0JON, KB0UUP, KI5RWK, and K5TAS. -- Dr. Steve Posner, KX5SP [The author is a retired U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Officer and served as an Emergency Response Coordinator and Communications Director for the National Disaster Medical System where he was deployed to 99 major disaster sites throughout the U.S. and around the world].
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