446.000 is simplex, as said above. It's also used as the 70cm FM calling channel. It's been 20+ years since I heard anyone using it as a calling channel, or even simplex use.
You'd think... 8*) Every bleeding time I go to test an HT on low-power on 446.0,
someone random pops up and tells me it's working!
I was in the SF bay area during the 1989 quake. There was some 2 meter traffic, but not much. If it's a big enough quake, people look after their family, friends and neighbors first. The play time on the radio comes after that. Other than a few check ins, and people talking about what they experienced, there wasn't much else. Again, not first responders, so other than discussion and some local reports, there really wasn't that much traffic.
Memories... For some odd reason, I got up that morning, packed five sandwiches (I couldn't tell you why - it was weird, even for me), three HT's and made my daily trek up to the labs in Berkeley, having NO idea what lay in store. When the quake hit, a small crowd formed around my shiny, new, 727r which was tuned to the helicopters circling the bay-bridge, while I was on 223.5 fielding reports from a friend who was driving around town trying to figure out where the worst damage was and where the headers were coming from.
A couple of days later - same buddy and I were working in the Red Cross shelter when there was a request to verify the phone number on our portable phone (lunch-box sized, looked a bit like an old Moto HandiTalkie). It was eventually determined that the number they had led to a, urm, house of delights? in SF... and laid out a full menu, so to speak 8*)
Was near Van Nuys for the Northridge quake. Fortunately, I didn't have to dig too deep to find that same 727r, and wound up passing H&W traffic through another station in San Diego for folks who were standing out at the curbside with me at ~3am or whatever time it was, freezing their butts off.
IIRC, when I first moved back to LA, there used to be a weekly earthquake net on 145.46 (I think?) and the repeater actually, for a time, was rigged to send an alarm with sufficient ground motion, but I think that's loooong gone.
...and then there was the Yucca Valley quake, in the middle of Field Day... ops on 2m paused for a few minutes, asked around for emergency traffic, and then it was straight back into 'CQ Field Day'...
