[Asterisk-Users] civil emergency comms: Asterisk + HAM

[Don Fanning]

"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: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] 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
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