History Starts in Charleston

In 2004 a group of concerned amateur (ham) radio operators and engineers saw a need to establish a backup communications system to support hospitals along the South Carolina coast during major disasters.  They conceived the Hospital Emergency Amateur Radio Team (HEART) project for emergency response.  This important system is activated when normal lines of communication are lost or severely crippled.  HEART has been a fully developed, viable asset that coastal hospital facilities use to communicate with first responders, coordinate patient transport, check hospital bed capacity, and track patient evacuations for the past two years.

The HEART network was formed and piloted under the direction of John Welton, N4SJW, District Emergency Coordinator for the mid-coastal area, and Brian Fletcher, K6NWS, (both Registered Nurses with extensive emergency care experience).  Funding was provided by the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).  John and Brian got crucial engineering and development support from Bryce Meyers, K4LXF, John Place, W4HNK, and Mike Wells, WA4HVP.  The original spark for the project ignited when a routine communications assessment revealed there was no interior amateur radio coverage for the Medical University of South Carolina hospital. After the events of 9/11, emergency communications, especially in hospitals, moved to a more decentralized command and support structure, raising a question as to how best to incorporate amateur radio into disaster plans as they evolved. The traditional practice of putting a ham radio in the ER was not meeting the need to communicate in a wide area inside the hospital: for example, it was not wide enough to assist with patient and staff response or to supply logistics.  Not only did the hospitals need interior coverage, they also needed backups to communicate between facilities and with first responders in the field.  Especially with the prevailing assumption that our ubiquitous cell phones would not be available during an emergency, amateur radio was viewed as a “safety net” for existing public safety communications.  The overall design philosophy was to put small 2M or 440 repeaters at key hospitals and to link them by a frequency-agile remote base through several regional UHF hubs. This allowed a great deal of redundancy in the system to overcome potential losses due to storms, earthquakes, etc.

Today, the HEART system provides backup communications support for hospitals in the tri-county area of Charleston, Berkley and Dorchester. HEART is designed to be used daily for amateur radio communications, and when necessary for health and medical support, Red Cross, SKYWARN, and local government emergency communications.  The HEART system remains under the control of amateur radio operators and is regulated by FCC rules. The success of the HEART system led state preparedness experts to advocate for expansion of the system to provide a means to link the local HEART radio resources statewide, supporting South Carolina’s health and medical communities.