Dec 12, 2009
Moving Ham Radio Beyond Emergency Communications
The other day I came across this tweet on twitter that lead to a great blog post on the perceived importance of emergency commmunications in amateur radio.
Is amateur emcomm/ARES-oriented groups “a waste”? http://bit.ly/8JdTdv #hamr #hamradio
@K0KDS Kevin Sanders
This peaked my intrest, because I don’t have the warmest of feelings towards ARES/RACES/MARS/CAP/REACT or any other related groups. It’s nothing personal; I just feel, like many others, that my safety and wellbeing is best served by a professional rather than an amateur. The main talking points for this blog post comes from the below YouTube video, which echos my feelings towards emergency communications and amateur radio in general.
I posted the link to the YouTube video on Twitter and got a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. One individual asked in what direction should we as hams push amateur radio. This is an excellent question, because each of us have own answers. Some will suggest the use of more frequencies, other will want to remain with the status quo, and coarse the emergency communications folks will want to stroke their egos as they justify directing traffic at next years summer carnival as a vital public service. I on the other hand have a few different ideas on how I’m going to push amateur radio past emergency communications.
Software Defined Radio
A Software-Defined Radio system, or SDR, is a radio communication system where components that have typically been implemented in hardware (e.g. mixers, filters, amplifiers, modulators/demodulators, detectors, etc.) are instead implemented using software on a personal computer or embedded computing devices. As computers become smaller and more powerful I think SDR should begin to pickup more of a a following.
Voice over IP
Voice over IP is a real interesting technology. It takes packets of information which contain audio and transports them across an IP network; in amateur radio repeaters are linked together across IP networks. I’ve used this technology both professionally and in my own home. I once worked for a county government that spanned two LATA’s. The county incurred thousands of dollars in long distance fees each year, until a VoIP phone network was put into place. The system paid for itself in two years. With that being said VoIP is a technology that hams should be exploring. One can virtually connect with others around the world with only a hand held radio. But alas some old timmers don’t consider this true DXing and thus look down on the use of VoIP in amateur radio. I personally think the new technology is more exciting than DXing and plan to pursue it.
Python and Ham Radio
I’ve been working hard the last few weeks on learning the Python programing language. In my quest to become more proficient in Python, I’ve been looking into areas where Python is mixing with amateur radio. The following is a list of projects I found that tie the two areas together.
- GNU Radio: GNU Radio is a leading software defined radio project written in the Python programing language.
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PySquelch: PySquelch is a program that monitors a frequency for radio activity and then graphs the activity over time. This video demonstrates how it works.
- SkHamPy: SkHamPy is a program that I found that mixes Skype, ham radio, and python.
As you can see these are just a few areas of ham radio that you can explore. There are many more areas that I didn’t cover; mainly because I don’t have an intrest in them. So don’t think you are just bound to emergency communications and free labour for you local law enforcement. There is an entire world of ham radio just waiting to be discovered. So go after the areas you are interested in, and by all means talk about your activities on the air. You might be surprised how many others are out their that share the same intrest as you.
One last note…when all else fails and the world is coming to an end, stand by and let the emergency communications hams have their moment in the sun. After all they can lead us down the road to hell any faster at that point.
