Tracking food supplies off-grid with ham radio and JS8Call

Josh CentersContributor - October 20, 2020

If we had another hiccup in the food chain as we did in the spring, you’d probably keep up with it via the internet — by monitoring sites like The P
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Re: an alternative to the iPad mini- Have you heard of the e-ink tablet “Remarkable“? I’ve been considering getting one myself to use as a more affordable e-ink monitor. Since it’s easier to see e-ink outside, and it should be less of a power drain, you might be able to kill two digital birds with one stone tablet. It would mess with your color coding, of course, but might be a worthwhile tradeoff.  

Keep up the great work!

 

Thanks for the kind words. I love e-ink, but it’s a bit pricey and e-ink is slow, which I’m sure would be frustrating. The Pi and the digital modes are slow enough on their own, I’m afraid interface lag would make me completely lose patience.

 

Very neat. My wife and I are planning a similar setup for off-grid operating. We like your setup. 73 from K5BDL and K5PFL in Tyler, TX (EM22IH)

 

Excellent article.

Thanks for the great plug for Amateur Radio!

Nice photo of the Xiegu G90 setup.

(There is also a groups.io group with ~1500 members:  XieguG90.groups.io)

AC9OX

 

Great group, I’m a member! Definitely the place to be if you have a G90.

 

This is an absurd fantasy. Ham radio operators love to promote these “end of days” scenarios. But, Amateur radio is a hobby of largely elderly white men who are completely disconnected from app culture, streaming, social media. Anything more advanced than a Zoom call or surfing the web is beyond their reach. Moreover they have no interest in learning. Ham radio is the only culture where you will hear men dismiss the need for a smart phone, brag that their PC is years old and “just fine”.  In ham radio culture, formal education is often belittled and academic achievment and professional expertise is denigrated (Its a hoax!)

This was probably a fun experiment to conduct but has no demonstrated value as a tool. Yet this kind of ham radio propaganda is the life blood of a hobby  that aches to have something meaningful to do.  (See : The increasing irrelevance of Emcomm

The author sugggest ways to explore ham radio.  12 year old kids routinely pass these exams as the questions and answers are published in the open.  One of the great myths about Ham radio is that it is a hobby of technology enthusiasts.  But most of the on-air discourse is about radio equipment that is decades old.   If you would like to spend time with  a group of overwhelmingly white middle age to elderly men– where you will never hear discussions of “last book read” or  general conversations about VR, AI, Machine learning, Augmented reality, Quantum computing, or best  PC game or app or device– then Ham radio is the place for you. 

Mike WA4D

Charlottesville, Va

 

My experience with ham radio has been different than what you are describing above. I am 28 years old and got into ham radio to grow my communications ability. I am actively involved in a weekly preparedness net where we talk about emergency preparedness and share information and knowledge with each other. I was involved with ARES for a while and while many of them were that older white males, we had people of all ages and also females participate. I personally wanted to stick to the older technologies of analog ham radio, but they all were wanting to go digital and involve technology and computers to improve their communications. Many of them worked in the technology field and the things they were implementing were way over my head, and I am pretty tech savvy myself.

My cousin is 18 and he and his friends all got their licenses last year so that they could talk to each other.

I just wanted to say that my experience with ham radio is different. There are always many different nets going on at any time. If you are an older white male and just want to talk about old equipment, there is a net for that. If you want to talk about the weather, technology, preparedness, or animals, there is probably a net for that. There are many cool and fun things you can do with ham radio, such as receive images from the international space station, share GPS location, and many other things besides just talking.

 

It doesn’t need to be the “end of days” to use EmComm style communications. I’m part of a ham community here in Southern California that uses radio for outdoor / mountain portable use. The people in our group are pretty diverse and tech savvy, utilizing digital modes, cell phone or computer to radio integrations, homebrew equipment, etc. We have over a hundred members and are growing almost daily. Learning is the only constant. We also have search and rescue members in our group from various teams across the state. I have personally been either directly or indirectly involved in ham radio being used in midst of power outages in mountain communities, wilderness emergency scenarios, people at sea needing assistance, etc. Mind you that I have only been a ham operator for about a year now.

If those examples weren’t enough, the recent fires here in California are a perfect example to show that our cell infrastructure is indeed susceptible to disasters: https://www.govtech.com/em/disaster/Cellphone-Outages-During-Fires-are-a-Preview-of-Life-After-a-Big-Quake.html

Even if cell towers remain up, the flood of traffic immediately following an earthquake or natural disaster renders cell phone communications useless. I’ve experienced this myself after a recent earthquake.

And yes, the barriers to entry to become a ham operator have largely been removed. No more 20WPM CW extra exam, and yes the questions are available online. And no wonder – people no longer need to build their radios largely from scratch and modern hams operate their equipement from a much higher layer of abstraction than people did 30 years ago. Case in point: the use of CW, after the CW requirement was done away with, is making a major comeback as indicated by Internet search trends, YouTube videos, etc. I am working on 20WPM profiency with CW, and refuse to take my Amateur Extra test without first passing one of the old code tests, but that is my personal preference.

So I would have to agree with Gideon that my experience with ham radio has been quite different than yours. That being said, I do see the segment of ham operators on the air that you are talking about, but in 15 years, it’s going to be people like the author that will remain, and they’ll be the ones to determine the future direction of ham radio.

 

I agree that there is a big tech gap in the ham radio community. The Icom IC-705 has been all the hype lately because it includes Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, features that are pretty much taken forgranted elsewhere, but are novel in radio. And as I mentioned in this article, a lot of the software is outdated and hard to use. And a lot of it is still either Windows-only or so heavily based in Windows that it’s hard to use outside of it. That said, there are bright spots. What you can do with a BaoFeng and a smartphone via APRS is pretty cool.

But I strongly disagree that EMCOMM is a thing of the past. I recently documented a couple of cases in our forum, one where ham radio could have saved a life, and another where it did save a life. Joe W1WCN has written quite a bit about his efforts with ARES in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurrican Maria.

And it doesn’t take the end of the world to envision a situation where I’m largely cut off from communications. I have no cellular service at my house, so when the power goes out, my choices are the landline phone and ham radio, unless I drive to somewhere with cellular service. And part of my interest in HF is because I’m in a valley and have to climb a hill to reach much of anyone on VHF. If I can ever get Winlink working, it’ll be a great tool to contact my employers and clients if I have an extended outage.

 

I did a quick look into what Winlink is, and that sounds very interesting. What are you going to have to do to get that up and running? I hope we can see a blog post about that someday!

 

In theory, I have it set up, but I haven’t been able to connect to any stations yet. If I ever get it working reliably I’ll definitely write about it!

 

Awesome article and information. I recently received my Technician’s license earlier this month, and am right now in the process of upgrading to the General. I had never heard of AmRRon or other similar groups before, and this concept has really piqued my interest! Looking forward to learning more about Amatuer Radio in the coming weeks, and hopefully getting involved constructively with like-minded people.

Thanks for a facinating and well-written article!