Hi Dave, It is good to see someone at the Area Net level here on this group. The last I heard, my Section and Region nets have no digital presence. I have discussed incorporating digital modes some years ago with the STM, but there seems to be almost all focus on phone and CW.
As a ham who has spent well over a quarter century with digital modes, I have watched the unfoldment of ham technology from RTTY, to packet, to proprietary modes and more recently to the ubiquitous sound card modes that make this practical and affordable to almost any ham who has an interest. The key is that they have to have the interest but very few hams have that interest. And for those that do, they often focus on RTTY and/or PSK31 for DXing and some contesting, not as much for public service. With the advent of near instantaneous communication (during normal times) there is a much higher minimum expectation to be relevant to new hams. The ham public service that we can count on to get outside our immediate area is primarily NTS for traffic handling and that can incorporate NTS/D. We can deliver message traffic to most anywhere that it is legal to do third party traffic. As an example, I was able to do this for a victim of a tornado in a nearby community in the past couple of years. There are limited non-proprietary digital technologies we can use in my area that do not require e-mail. Perhaps the one exception could be some kind of NBEMS (Narrow Bandwidth Emergency Messaging System) network, since it provides a manual link on each end to access NTS, internet, etc. if (and it is a pretty big if) you can find someone who has this capability. This is the only open source cross platform system available at this time that has this potential. There are several non-proprietary systems available, but they are primarily for sending e-mail traffic which can only work if you have an e-mail address for the recipient. And there can be time value issues, although it can work well for casual and lower priority traffic. One requires Linux, thus is impractical here in the U.S. another uses a older wide footprint, but relatively slow FSK mode that has other issues making it unlikely to be used. The Winmor protocol could be one of the breakthroughs if it is open and shared with the amateur community since it could provide peer to peer and e-mail capability on both HF and VHF using the same sound card technology. This means that if you have a multimode/multiband rig, and interface it with a computer sound card, you could use this technology from 160 meters up to 440 Mhz! This could be a huge paradigm shift. On a related note, for near term wider coverage, especially for emergency situations, earlier this month I was one of the few U.S. hams who participated in the world wide IARU GlobalSET. Although prepared to operate with any sound card digital mode, CW, or SSB phone, with emergency battery and generator back up power, I could only find very limited phone contacts, primarily a station in Canada and W1AW here in the U.S. as outlined in the eham.net article: http://www.eham.net/articles/20413 I would ask that any hams at least consider participating in the next GlobalSET activity. It is only a short duration (4 hour) event so easy to set aside some time for ... yes, even digital modes. While CW was permitted (at speeds not to exceed 15 wpm) phone is the main mode used thus far. In order to get some digital activity going I am convinced we need to plan this ahead of time, e.g, specific modes and specific frequencies, so we can find each other. Is there any interest? Maybe NTS and NTS/D can get involved? 73, Rick, KV9U Moderator, HFDEC Yahoogroup (Hams for Disaster and Emergency Communications) David Struebel wrote: > Gee, > > I kinda of thought that NTS Digital had been doing this for the past > 10 or 15 years on a 24/7 basis, maybe I was mislead. > > Dave WB2FTX > Eastern Area Digital Coordinator - NTS Digital
