><Walt/K5YFW wrote>< > There has been some discussion about what mode does what > and what is needed/desired. > ... > We have had a little discussion on what the problems were > during Katrina with digital communications. > ...An automatic call ability, such as SELCALL, would be very > nice to have. > ... > I believe that the type of operations I was involved in, and > will be again this hurricane season, are useful in passing > many if not most types of > traffic on HF.
Hi Walt, While Alan KM4BA was setting up stations for Red Cross in the "Katrina Zone" in Mississippi, several of us in the amateur ALE net maintained contact with him many times every day. Alan used 100W mobile ALE with PCALE in a laptop through FT897 and ATU. He used a status reporting function that is part of the new ham ALE Geo Position Reporting (ALE-GPR) standard, and it was linked to his GPS to give his location (similar to APRS). We were able to call back and forth just about any time of the day or night, get his GPR automatically, link with him every day on voice... even during the solar storms that happened in the second week, sometimes with great signals for short time periods on frequencies such as 21MHz or 24MHz, which was not predicted by any charts or even the ionosonde maps. Sometimes, during the solar disturbances, I was able to link with Alan easier from here in California than were the stations closer to him. Really, when you get down to it, the biggest strong points of ALE is the standard itself, since it is becoming nearly ubiquitous built in to government and commercial transceivers. There are so many EOC, SHARES, NGO organizations, and government HF stations now that have ALE built in to their transceivers... in an emergency, the ability to inter-operate using available HF equipment is a big advantage. By the way, the feature of ALE we use often, is the AMD short messaging system (Automatic Message Delivery), which is accessed from the front panel of embedded-ALE transceivers. After making the initial link contact via ALE, we "negotiate" via the AMD what modes are available to both sides of the QSO. It is easy then to go to voice or some keyboarding mode, or do an ARQ file exchange. Bonnie KQ6XA Bonnie KQ6XA Need a Digital mode QSO? Connect to Telnet://cluster.dynalias.org Other areas of interest: The MixW Reflector : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/themixwgroup/ DigiPol: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Digipol (band plan policy discussion) Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
