I was fairly active in Ham Radio, until about 8 years ago, when I kind of lost interest. I was just clearing out some old electronics and discovered a 2 meter rig, a Yaesu Vx 5, a lot of cables and several antennas. The tower is long gone, but I could do a treetop mount and get to 80-90' AGL with little trouble (thanks to the buddies at the fire company one district over and their 100' ladder truck!)

I'm kind of interested in creating a local, moderate speed data network of sorts, I've read up on Winlink, and perhaps getting into voice modes again. I have a Technician class license that is still active (I kept it active because it allows you to have a mobile scanner in most states and in some other countries).

Assuming a minimal budget what would you suggest I start with these days? Seems like all the equipment is very different than when I stopped.

i'll watch this post with interest--i use an old Hallicrafter to listen in on shortwave and would like to get a license now that you don't have to learn morse code. a few times a year they offer classes at the Vets hospital just down the street and someone left the test book in the give-away book shelf in one of the clinics.it looks easy--but Martin's gear question will be really helpful..

+1. Made popcorn, watching closely.

My first recommendation for returning hams is ARRL:

http://www.arrl.org/

http://www.hello-radio.org/

Where you can start to get a feel for what is current and recent.

As for where to start again. Well, 2 meter is always a good break in point. You keep it local, keep it live, and you already have most all you need to get going. 2 meter voice is still in good use. In the meantime, you can research packet and winlink and such and get yourself up to speed on what is being done and what equipment is being used.

I've always been an HF geek, and would like to get back into code keying again. That's where all the old rag-chewers hang out at 30-45 wpm. You are in thin air with that crowd, but it is a good place to be.

A good compromise is the 28 Mhz/10 meter crowd. You can keep it local or pump it OTH, so you get the best of both worlds.

I don't mess much with the exotics anymore. After playing around with telemetry and microwave and such for a living, it's fun but not as much as just jabbering. I suppose I wouldn't mind doing some spread spectrum stuff again. It's always fun to be able to communicate without the feds being able to eavesdrop.

That VX 5 is a sweet little unit. Run it into a tri-band mast and at that AGL you should have pretty darned good coverage. Is that a TNC or an SMA female as the antenna jack? I always preferred TNC. I would recommend nothing less than RG-214 for antenna cable for 5/2 Meter ops, and LM 400 flex if you can afford it for the 440 Mhz ops. N connectors seem to be the rage these days, but I remember when everything was terminated with PL-259s, and BNCs at the bench.

Still a lot of grumpy old men there, it seems.




Not here.




ACK! Code! Run away!



That's exactly the space I'm interested in - ad-hc digital networking.



TNC. I've always been frustrated with the VX 5 interface. What I want is a device the looks like and is as easy to use as a smart phone. All the Yeasu's have these 10-layer meta functions on the keys..."HOLD down the FN and the 8 Key While Standing on one foot, jump up twice and power on the unit whilst still airborne to change the Narrow Band Squelch level. Hold down the FN SHIFT and Power Button for 4.567 seconds and then press the "2" key to change from Narrow band Squelch to Wideband Squelch"



That's what I've got - two runs of 300' each N connectors at both ends. Also have a lot of quad shield RG-8 in various lengths from 50' to 200'.


TO be honest, since I posted the message, I've been kind of discouraged by what I've seen. It's like the whole of all digital communications is commercial now and the stuff that used to be leading edge experimental is nowhere to be seen on the ham radio sites. I guess my 8 years off, like so many other people, left little incentive to really innovate.

If you really want to use a digital system, look into the Icom DStar radios.

Frankly, I think it's more hype than it is useful but it might suit your needs.

JohnE

P.S. If you'd be interested in selling that Yaesu radio, let me know.

Some good ideas. I've also found 2M active most areas of the country, along with some 70cm. (In our area, unfortunately, the Air Force had to have all of the area 440mhz repeaters shut down because they apparently interfeared with the Pave Paws Radar on Cape Cod. That's primarily designed to detect ICBM's and SLBM's fired at the east coast...) Recently, we've had some very wide area coverage added to the region with 6M repeaters on mountain tops. Nice.

In addition to ARRL, you might check to see if there is a local amateur club. I found quite a few folks in our local club that were very skilled in the digital comm's modes. I'd also suggest you see if there is an ARES or RACES group in the area. The people involved in Skywarn are also usually tied into the local Ham community. Here are a couple things to try:

ARES (Amateur Radio Emergency Service) for Eastern Mass: http://ares.ema.arrl.org/index.php

Skywarn national home:
http://www.skywarn.org/

US Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service:
http://www.usraces.org/


Even if you're not into getting involved with emergency comm's as a volunteer, you'll be in touch with folks that are pretty up to date on currently technology, and will know the local infrastructure that you can connect with.

73 N1GFS

yeah ARRL do have their share of grumps. I suggest the site only as a place to start; a point of reference. They do have a fairly decent archive to help you catch up on.

What a shame to hear 2 meters is not active there. It was always a great band for finding out what was happening around the area.

I always felt code kept the hobby respectable. When all you could do was key the xmitter, you could still hold a conversation if you knew the code. Even jury rigging a spark gap xmitter was doable.

Digital xmissions were novel, but it always seemed that the digital stuff caused me the most trouble at work, and required continuous study trying to keep up with the myriad signal processing specs etc.

Yes, they do squeeze a bit too much into the unit functions now. Admittedly the old "Ron Popeil - Set it and forget it" units were better, even if quite limited comparably.

Well, at least we both like 214.

Cheers Martin.

Also try www.qrz.com
for used and (new) equipment, callsign database, tips hints and other things

Mike

http://www.nofars.org/sedan.html

This is used extensively in Florida to connect EOC's and the National Hurricane Center.

I do not know if this system is capable of connecting to other digital systems. You should contact the coordinator listed on the page for more info.

Martin,

Ben's suggestion of ARRL (American Radio Relay League) is good, but not specific.

May I suggest you contact Eric Olena (wb3fpl@arrl.org) the ARRL Section Manager for Eastern Pennsylvania. He is very likely to have the names of local people who can answer your questions on speed dial.

According to your "New unpaid job" post a few weeks ago, you have the "pleasure" of being in emergency management for your area. I think the Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) Emergency Coordinator for your area would be delighted make contact. I suspect you'd both have something to offer the other.

If you want to do research on the web, I suggest the eHAM web site. They have a number of discussion forums that cover the gamut of amateur radio. I tend to do a fair amount of surfing there.

While there have been "advances" in equipment, that doesn't mean your gear is obsolete. In the 'analog' arena, the 'old' gear talks to the 'new' gear just fine.

Dennis

Marty,

Might check out the folks at Chester County ARES/RACES in West Chester. It's an active group and they are very organized around digital communications. They also are well integrated with the Chesco EMA folks.

Andy

Along the lines of getting to know some local radio folks... Coming up June 27-28 is the annual ARRL Field Day weekend for amateur radio. If you have a local ham radio club, they may be participating. There will be folks setting up field stations for both voice and digital ops all over the country, often in some pretty out of the way places. In the past, we have bundled it into a camping trip near a peak that would have good coverage with limited power.

You can find stations that have registered to participate in the 2009 Field Day at:

http://www.arrl.org/contests/announcements/fd/locator.php

You can enter your location, and see what might be going on in your area.

I'd like to just clarify for everyone what I know and have done in ham radio.

I was very active in local clubs and field days, was in ARES and RACES, had portable "Go" kits and all that. I realize now that what put me "off" ham radio was not so much the lack of knowledge or interest, it was that ham radio transitioned from cutting edge global communications tool to local emergency backup system fairly quickly, and more importantly, all of the really cool stuff moved into the commercial area and away from the hobbyist.

I mean, really, when my son can video chat with me from a cheap "netbook" when I'm in Amsterdam, sending text at 9,600 baud isn't really all that thrilling.

Where my interest was/is right now is in building ad-hoc long and short range medium-band interoperable wireless data networks that could replace/augment standard internet infrastructure in an emergency and allow for the use of standardized software such as web browsers & instant messenger clients.

Anyway I'm looking at Winlink and such. Fairly neat stuff, and it's really exactly what I want to be doing with Ham radio.

We're in pretty similar places Martin - the thing that struck me about ham after I got my technician's ticket a couple years ago was, Boy, these guys are a couple decades behind. Second thought as I got more involved with some orgs designing their preparedness efforts for surivivability - particularly comms - was boy, we had better work to keep the wireless network available. With wireless we have SMS and text messaging, the possibility of cell voice traffic at least for those with priority. Without it we lose at least 99% of our responders, with no way to verify availability. The wireless folks have similar thoughts - they have rapid deployment forces to restore the network on a priority basis, generators attached to nodes nearest EOCs, basically they're doing the right things, but they're bounded by commercial interest, not so much by a true emergency signalling capability. I think the government needs to step in and support ($) that effort.

Anyway, they're working on the emergency comms plan in our local Red Cross chapter, and it relies on ham as the fallback - a decidedly last century fallback. I hope we can get folks up and running on some of the newer tools that would allow geolocation, so a central Ham operator at the EOC can at least track who is online and where, and which direction they are moving.

I'm a newly licensed Ham, got my Technician's ticket last year in fact.

I've gotten pretty involved with a local ARES group that works with area hospitals, have worked one "incident" and a couple of non-emergency events with a couple more coming up.

What I've seen is that there seems to be a moving away from using what for lack of a better term, the old fashioned radio gear and methods towards some of the newer digital stuff like DStar. I think that's frankly, a bad idea, here's why. In the case of a serious public emergency event, one in which power is lost in particular, those cell towers that folks have gotten so dependent on are either not going to be working or they'll be so overloaded as to be useless, I'm thinking of things like earthquakes and other natural disasters here. A system like DStar without the use of the net is just a really expensive radio with very limited text capability that requires the use of a laptop in order to get full functionality. That means adding another expensive, power using piece of equipment to the the mix. Which is the reverse of what one wants in an emergency, in my opinion.

In my limited experience responding to communications emergencies what was needed was basic, voice communications between multiple points with a minimum of equipment and fuss. That can be easily set up with some really easy to use Ham radios. The problems I see with focusing on the more esoteric systems is that they're expensive, harder to learn to use and frankly, have more capability than needed for emergency use. I don't need to be able to send a text message halfway around the world at G3 speeds if there's a wildfire burning near me in Los Angeles county but I might need to be able to send a message from a hospital that's lost their power and phone lines due to that same fire as happened just a few months ago here in Los Angeles county. When it comes to the more mundane uses, do I really need a $1000 handheld radio hooked up to a computer which in turn is connected wirelessly to the net thru a server in another state to let race control know that the last runner has passed thru my checkpoint, as I did just last month at a local trail race.

The problem is that there is an attitude amongst a lot of the well, lets call them the more senior Ham operators out there that if you didn't get your license by going to the FCC office and can't tap out CW at 30+ wpm that you are somehow unworthy of using a Ham radio. That attitude filters down and can be extremely discouraging to those newbies who are interested in learning more about Ham radio. There's a very real "if you don't know, I'm not gonna tell you" attitude in some people, luckily there are more Hams that are ready and willing to be of help to both the new folks as well as the general public. If there wasn't I never would gotten my license in the first place.

Yes, BUT remember we have call prioritization and it works. Just because MOST people are blocked, that does not mean ALL. Also, portable cell sites - self-powered and all that - are commonplace nationwide and are typically 5 to 10 hours away from almost anywhere.



My point here is to forget the net entirely and paint the local area with a mesh network as needed/possible and if there's a narrowband connection to a place where the regular network is up, reserve it for emergency traffic only.





And it should be. But in an age where I can walk into a hotel I've never been to 3,000 miles from home, open a laptop, and expect to get a working IP address via DHCP, connect to a WWLAN and then gain access to whatever network services are available, the same level of "minimal fuss" should be available for ham-based emergency WWWAN services.



Of course you don't need a $1000 radio for something like that, when a $150 webcam with WiFi could do far more, including streaming video of the checkpoint to a central location. Or better still, you just put up a RFID sniffer and let the checkpoints be like those automatic toll readers.
And as far as text messages. No you don't need to go around the world..but then again...do you really need to use voice for most routine emergency comms?

Let's face it a - Sony Mylo would be a perfectly good tool for check-ins, basic resource requests, status updates, and the command post could simply observe the flow of messages. Urgent messaging would, of course, be voice based mostly, but there's a lot more to digital comms than sending email to aunt edna.




These are all good points, however, I've been through quite a few more incidents over the last few years, including major river floods and wildfires, and I think that my interest in the more complicated modes is less about field operations as they are command center operations. I was also a fire fighter, and I can assure you that goofing around with a complicated radio is the last thing we wanted - the radio you used while operating was set to conventional, analog mode and there's a darn good reason for that.

That said, I also look at a service like Twitter and how effectively that's been used in the West Coast fire service. I compare the clunky APRS to the more elegant Navizon for the iPhone or the various hideously complex implementations of managing health and welfare traffic as compared to something as simple as a google spreadsheet and I realize that the one thing that Ham radio can bring to the table is Portable, Frequency-Agile, Agency-Agnostic communications gateways for inter-agency and intra-operational command to command operations.

To your point of grumpy old farts not willing to share - that's exactly what I've encountered for 85% of them, including our local ARES/RACES group. Thus far I've found the folks running the Winlink platform to be far more rational and realistic and willing to work with others than some of my local resources.

Great discussion, and it's given me a totally different idea - what we need in an emergency is Wide Area hotspots, meshed and backhauled via ham radio to the next command post where possible.

hmmmm

Over the next week, we'll be helping with a drill to simulate ARES response to an emergency on Cape Cod. They are including resources from outside, adjoining districts, to see how to integrate them. Should be interesting. It's a virtual drill, but, I think doing evercises like this helps shake out the bugs before we have a real incident. I like the idea of checking in volunteers from beyond the immediate drill area to see how well they can be incorporated into the team and what kind of availability of resources we have on short notice. What follows was an invitation with more info.

--------
Subject: South Shore EMCOMM resource net exercise
Hi Ron,
Date: 9 May 2009
Time: 0900-1100 EDST

This basic/low level exercise is sponsored by South Shore ARES.
It is being conducted to simulate a disaster situation on Cape Cod that will require relief operators from our adjoining district. ARES and RACES operators that wish to participate are asked to check in briefly on either the Bridgewater 147.18 repeater or the Fairhaven 145.49 repeater.
EC's and RACES officers can also gather the information from their group and pass it along with a single checkin.

For this exercise, look at your schedule for the next week and provide a date and shift(s) you could be available to deploy to Cape Cod. If you would be unavailable, that is fine too. Just check in or let your ARES EC/RACES officer know. Please plan a 12 hour window. Two hours to travel and brief, 8 hours on shift, and 2 hours to debrief and travel home. For the exercise we are assuming 0800-1600, 1600-2400, and 2400-0800 shifts. No deployments will actually occur.

A brief checkin is all that is requested. The information could also be communicated via Echolink
(*NEWENG) or even via email.

Exercise objectives
-Validate contact information and communicate with Emcomm operators -Exercise the leadership to assemble communication resource information -Net Control/liason to communicate the relief information to the Cape Cod ARES DEC

Cape Cod ARES is also conducting a low power QRP exercise Saturday am 1000-1200. An attempt will be made to voice relay the available relief head count and shifts to the CC ARES DEC.
WINLINK may also be used.

Thank you for your interest in public service.

South Share ARES District Emergency Coordinator Carver RACES officer

Winlink is evil. It never checks the state of the channel before transmitting, therefore it often QRMs existing conversations.

Look at PSKMail for long-distance HF email.

A

HF Winlink IS a PITA

Around HERE (NYC) we have standardized on using VHF winlink on the Flexnet packet network. There are enough redundant nodes, that we don't really have infrastructure worries (Besides, 2 of our guys are people who put up nodes, and have 3-4 spares in their gear)

This gets rid of the evil of HF winlink

Um, my point was that Winlink was evil on any band. It does not check for channel activity before transmitting. Consequently it disrupts any ongoing conversation. If you search the web you will find many instances of this happening, together with explanations from the developers that this is all right (it's not).

A

Actually, it sort of depends - on VHF, you are usually going through a TNC that has open squelch detect - or at least the ones I use do (as do the radios I use - channel busy detect)

We have it fairly well standardized up here in the area, and the packet channels are (mostly) empty - in fact, until we started pushhing a few practice nets with ARES, they were totally dead - on the order of a few transmissions/week

Once we are onto a user node, there is traffic control from the node out to the other nodes (the way flexnet works is it bumps the 1200 baud VHF traffic up to 9600 baud UHF, deconflicts, and sends to the next backbone node). We have PMBOs on both the VHF user side, and on the 9600 baud UHF side to get the data onto the internet as fast as possible

NYC is lucky this way - If I remember right, (I could go look it up) we have 4 active VHF packet node frequencies, and around town, the owners have basically said "These frequencies will be Winlink traffic"

The beauty of using the Flexnet is we are just piggybacking packet traffic on existing packet traffic nodes - no real difference - in fact, the path setup is done the same way