"Priority" traffic by ARRL standards would fall into both of these categories. What they are saying is that if someone is in a area where a ham is operating and needs to get someone hauled out via emergency services, priority traffic would take precedence over normal traffic. Not quite a "Mayday" situation but close to. Hams have come through for the most part but since we're way off topic, it boils down to poor planning on the emergency coordinator for a given town/county/city/state.
Let's face it. When FEMA rolls in, there's no question about their communications. If they can run it through commercial terrestrial providers, fine. Otherwise, they have satellites phones that take less than a few minutes to set up (if that). Sure it's expensive to joe smith. But we're talking about the government here where justification always outweighs cost. That being said. Asterisk has tremendous value to the HAM community. People have always been happy to get a phone call from a serviceman at sea (using MARS) or using autopatches to order pizza's. I don't think that part is argued. The question is how it could be helpful? Asterisk Conferences - Add the ability for people who are HAMS to log into a protected chat room and communicate to both equipped and non equipped hams (using cell phones). Emergency services could teleconference a Public Radio Service repeater and monitor the conference to coordinate responses with lower overhead (again using COTS equipment). Asterisk Autopatching - This would allow people to setup "Health and Welfare" phone booths for people to call their loves ones and coordinate their return to a normal life. One feature that I see really lacking in Asterisk however is the ability to outdial from a teleconference to "three-way" them into a conference as well as moderator functions. Of course these features are in Alliance teleconferences but would be nice to add in as well. Cepstral Integration - Imagine if your car was stolen and it was equipped with APRS. You could write a script that would read lon/lat, do the map lookup and feed back location information every 10 seconds to assist in recovery. All it would take is 3-waying into the asterisk, logging in and having * read back the information to emergency response. The applications are endless with a system like this. -Don -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of C. Hatton Humphrey Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2005 6:23 PM To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] civil emergency comms: Asterisk + HAM > I think the biggest thing that hurts ham radio's ability to react to a > crisis is the lack of equipment and operators. Most of the traffic we > pass is "Health and Welfare" with "Logistics" being the second to it. You might be interested to take a listen to the latest ARRL News - they give a count of Priority traffic messages passed for Katrina... http://www.arrl.org/arrlletter/audio/ The site is ARRL and it's their "ARRL Letter" feed to be presented on repeaters. The ARES response to Katrina articles have the info I'm referring to. Sorry for the OT addition to the thread but I find it worth mentioning. Also, for my two cents I'll toss in that the first thing I thought of when someone mentioned using Asterisk with Ham was to get a Laptop with a WiFi connection, Asterisk and a radio interface on scene to provide comm links. 73 de NY5I Hatton Humphrey _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation sponsored by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
