The State of Digital Ham Radio
July 8, 2002 - by:Jeff Pulver I'm WA2BOT and I've been a licensed Amateur Radio operator since 1975 and over the years I have enjoyed experimenting with various forms of communication besides just CW and Phone.
When VocalTec launched Internet Phone back in 1995, a portion of the non-"radio active" Ham Radio Community slowly adopted the product and people like myself used iPhone in a manner which to some of us, made the internet feel like the "iBand".
Over the years, a number of projects/experiments have been run by people active in the Ham Radio community who were fascinated by the prospect of interconnecting their PCs with their radios (rather than with their telephones) to create Radio Frequency (RF) links. The iLink Board has become the unofficial standard amongst ham radio operators who link their PCs with their radio equipment.
Back in April (2002), VocalTec stopped supporting their IPhone servers which resulted in accelerating the adoption of other Internet based community products developed by fellow Ham Radio operators. These days there are several "Ham Radio Networks" which I recommend from personal experience. Most of these networks provide free client software which use VoIP and IP based Conference rooms to make you feel like you are on the air with fellow ham radio operators. As long as you have an active Ham Radio license, you owe it to yourself to check out: eQSO and EchoLink and be aware of iLink and The Internet Radio Linking Project (IRLP) .
Most of these networks support the use of the iLink Board should you decide to provide a local RF link in your community to any of these respective networks.
The cool part about these networks is that it allows licensed, non-active radio operators, the opportunity to communicate with fellow ham radio operators at a time when being able to setup RF equipment just isn't practical or feasible. I believe that as more ham radio operators learn about these alternative ways to communicate, more will come forward and take advantage of their broadband internet connectivity and spent some of their time re-experiencing a hobby which they grew up with and once loved.
eQSO took me about 2 minutes to install and get "on the air". Echolink was also fast to install but the extra time was spent when the network validated my ham radio callsign. Most mornings I can be found for a few minutes in room "101 English" on eQSO. At night I've been using EchoLink more often. For my summer project, I'm going to try to setup a local RF link for eQSO and help others from the metro NYC gain access to this network.
Please feel free to email me if you would like to setup a Sked. :-).
73's de Jeff
