Antennas for Emergency Communications

July 14, 2020

Over the past year, I have experimented with a lot of antennas trying to find a good combination of gain and portability since the majority of my contacts are in the field. I will summarize my observations and make some recommendations broken down into two categories: packable and transportable.  There are plenty of good vehicle-mounted and home base antennas to talk about, but since this article is about emergency communications in the field (as in, on foot or on a bike – my experience), I won’t discuss those here.

Packable Antennas

By “packable”, I literally mean an antenna that can …

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Our First Summit Activation

August 16, 2020

My wife Julie (KN6AOC) and I did our first summits on the air activation over the weekend at Strawberry Peak W6/CT-086 in the Twin Peaks area between Lake Gregory and Lake Arrowhead.   I logged 23 contacts and Julie got 17.  I also made my first summit to summit contact with K1BAA who was working the Table Mountain W6/CT-067 summit near Wrightwood some 23 miles away.  And for a bonus, I sent a WinLink message to Cerritos American Red Cross station KK6SMD-10, about 50 miles away.  My longest contact of the day was 100 miles away with station KI6YLQ in Ridgecrest.  …

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WinLink Workshops

October 7, 2020

Emergency Coordinators from all across the United States met for 12 weeks to learn everything that one could possibly need to know about WinLink.  Click on the links to view recordings of those meetings.  Thank you to Dan, K7REX for making these available to the public.

If you are involved in emergency communications, you may want to consider joining the ARRL SEC discussion group here: https://groups.io/g/SEC-ARES

WK1 – Winlink Basics: Initial Setup and Basic Operation
Presentation: https://vimeo.com/441219236
Documents: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fwaejzwx0zkcid0/AAAx9GnWhPs9XMBHFPttEG0ya?dl=0

WK2 – Winlink Basics: Peer-2-Peer Operations; VARA FM and UZ7H0 on VHF
Presentation: https://vimeo.com/443288476
Documents: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/x9uaq9zvdxi5jmu/AABhLhp-7JvqfzJZh1ciGRbxa?dl=0

WK3 – Winlink Advanced: Gateways; …

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Demonstration of a Cisco SPA504G IP Phone on AREDN Mesh Using Battery Power

January 18, 2021

Parts list:

  • TP-Link CPE610 Dish with POE adapter connected to a local ARDEN MESH AP over RF
  • TP-Link TL-SG105E Managed Switch
  • Cisco SPA504G IP Phone
  • Generic 150w DC to AC converter
  • Duracell 7aH AGM 12v DC Battery

The video shows direct dialing via IP address. No PBX or external internet is needed for point to point connections as long as both nodes are connected to the same greater ARDEN mesh nework. Also, there are various ways to power up the devices. I chose the simple route of using existing AC adapters plugged into a DC to AC converter. You can …

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A Laptop, a POE battery and a TP-Link CPE-510 on AREDN for Phone, Chat, Video and File Sharing

January 21, 2021

 

This video demonstrates a working AREDN node that can make phone calls to other IP phones on the AREDN mesh network, and using the TeamTalk software can participate in video chat, audio chat, text chat and file sharing.

Parts list:
TP-Link CPE510 connected via RF to the AREDN network, tunneled to a node with Internet access
A battery which provides POE power to the CPE510 and lan connectivity to the computer
Any laptop with an RJ45 port
Linphone software – no SIP account needed for local IP dialing
TeamTalk Client

As you can imagine, a setup like this is …

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Demonstration of FreePBX with IP Phone Extension Running on the AREDN Mesh

February 9, 2021

My goal was a proof of concept to get IP phones running as extensions via a FreePBX server running on the MESH with the eventual purpose of using this all in the field. To get to that goal, several challenges needed to be overcome.

Establishing the AREDN MESH Network

To figure out how the AREDN mesh network works, I first needed to connect to what I call “the greater AREDN Mesh of Southern California“.  There are two ways to do this: either via RF (which is the optimal end goal of an AREDN implementation) or VIA IP Tunnel.  …

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