Re: Announce: EchoLink Howto
Hi everyone,
I have a few thoughts on this, since I've been volunteering quite a bit of
time with the IRLP project (www.irlp.net) for the last two years, including
running backend-servers for IP address tracking (yes, we track IP's so nodes
on DHCP networks as long as they have a public IP, work correctly), helping
out with troubleshooting problems in the status.irlp.net PHP scripts,
moderating mailing lists, and generally being outspoken about the technology
and helping people learn about it. For probably 65% or more of the hams
running IRLP, it was their first exposure to this thing we call "Linux",
too.
First off... IRLP is nothing more than a few bash scripts tying together
SpeakFreely for Unix and a hardware board on the parallel port. I would
guess that EchoLink and other Windows variants are similarly built, since
we've proven that the two interoperate nicely. (Most people in both groups
hardly realize that people have had the two talking to each other for some
time now... just neither group is very culturally interested in the other.)
Most of the folks running IRLP seriously just consider it a nice add-on to
their repeater system(s), like a fancy repeater controller or an autopatch,
or remote base. Nothing more. A few evangelize it as "the wave of the
future" but most of us just enjoy building nodes, connecting them to radios,
doing a high-quality job of setting levels, etc... like most
repeater-building work, the fun is in all the little details of construction
and tuning and getting things "just right" in your radios and audio paths.
A "quick vote" was put to IRLP's closed node-owner's mailing list two years
ago -- and the group has continued to this day to be very against ever
offering "PC headset" access. A large majority of the node owners still
agree to this day -- even now that we're at 900+ active nodes: Talking from
your PC is not ever going to be the central goal of the IRLP network.
Link radios on the nodes are a requirement. We don't have PC-only users.
You have to get on the air to access the network.
There's the possibility that PC-to-radio access might be offered on a future
date to call only a specific node, and the node owner would have to
authorize each individual PC that had access to do so... this was announced
at the IRLP Convention in Las Vegas, NV and another in Sweden in the last
month or so, and work on it is fairly low on the priority list, I'm pretty
sure.
As a group, culturally we're dedicated to connecting RADIOS, not PC
headsets. This is a large culture difference (besides using Linux instead
of Windows) between IRLP and other linking technology experimenters.
To respond to a few comments/questions people expressed:
Hamish said: "Do you call this amateur 'radio'?" -- Yes. We transmit and
receive in the Amateur band. IRLP is simply an enabling technology... and
EchoLink and others are basically the same. It really wasn't that big of a
leap from using telephone lines to link remote sites to using VoIP... the
fun has been in building a community of people who talk regularly just like
they were all locals. No propagation, no noise, no fuss. I punch four
digits and talk to Austrailia or Antartica. I have furthered the hobby by
actually continuing the oldest Ham Radio tradition there is... International
Good Will.
I've also learned some very interesting things about how ham radio is done
in those other countries that I would have never learned if I didn't talk to
them on at least a weekly basis, and some people -- daily. Foreign
licensing, the differences in their bands and bandplans, and general
"chit-chat" that I would have never taken the time on HF to have that length
of a conversation about, all of a sudden just happen as I'm driving home
from work in the Jeep.
Haines had a very eloquent posting about how technology keeps changing. So
true. Amateurs are still using 1970's technology for local communications,
as an example. Repeaters using a "standard" FM signal, 5 KHz wide, analog
are not going to be very "standard" for much longer. Here in the U.S., the
FCC is not going to allow sales of commercial repeater equipment capable of
5 KHz (what they're now calling "wideband") audio after 2008. They will
require no wider than 2.5 KHz deviation in systems sold that year.
Hams may or may not be able to realize that a) we're outdated in the
repeater/local communications world, and b) we would have to start designing
and utilizing digital technologies for local voice communications now and
play "catch-up" for the next decade just to keep up with commercial
innovations like, trunking, high-compression digital CODEC's, stndards like
the U.S. APCO-25 digital standards for interoperability, etc.
We're not the innovators anymore. However, commercial manufacturers may
have followed the lead of some of the Amateur VoIP applications in the last
year or so, as I've personally seen and used briefly both the Motorola and
EF Johnson repeaters with integrated Ethernet interfaces and TCP/IP software
in them now. Their initial implementations are pretty poor (one of the
above two uses IP Multicast with no heartbeats of any kind embedded in the
traffic... how do I know the ambulance REALLY heard me from the dispatch
console?) but they're learning IP networking quickly and they'll be able to
continue to easily build and design custom hardware.
Hams did much of the early work on repeater systems -- getting them to be
useful radio technology back when people didn't understand duplex noise or
why when there's a rusty bolt on the tower acting as a diode your own
transmitter will mix with other strong transmitters and re-enter your
receiver... etc. But most repeater technology was worked out longer ago
than I've been alive.
BUT... that being said. I'd never attempted to build a repeater before I
started playing with IRLP. I started volunteering to help repair, replace,
and otherwise work on a number of ham club's systems in my area and started
up a steep learning curve I wasn't expecting under the instruction of an all
new set of Elmers. Hey! Something else new and fun!
I'm still learning, and having a great time furthering my technical
knowledge of repeater systems. It is fun to squeak out that last 5dB from a
good quality reciever and pre-amp to get just that little bit more coverage
for end-users. And just as difficult as building a small QRP rig or
whatever... no, I'm not advancing the Art of Radio by building another
repeater, but I am advancing myself and my knowledge of radio... which many
hams are forgetting how to do. When you buy it in a box, plunk it on the
desk, plug it in and start talking -- that's not Ham radio.
Jaime stated: "It is also VoIP... so it is cutting edge tech!" I don't
know if he was joking or not, but unfortunately none of the hams involved
wrote the CODEC's (ADPCM and GSM for the most part), nor much of the actual
VoIP code -- those items are becoming commodity items unless you're creating
a new one to try for higher compression or better intelligibility. So yes,
the VoIP-based linking systems are using some fairly neat technology, but
none of us came up with it.
I enjoy the talks and discussions I get into on IRLP (oh heck, I even tried
EchoLink once or twice), but I still enjoy almost every other mode of
"traditional" hamming. I do lament a little bit that hams do not have the
pioneering spirit the hobby once did, though. Maybe I'm just looking at
history and only seeing the pioneers though, and not the ten other hams who
did nothing but enjoy their work.
I know Bdale has done some really amazing work for AMSAT, and would consider
him a ham pioneer. Same thing with another aquantance of mine who's been
building homebrew transmitters (not using a signal generator) for distance
records into the hundreds of GHz for years now. He mentioned that there are
frequencies between 200 and 300 GHz where you have to avoid the resonant
frequency of O2. :-) That's very very neat. I would have never made that
connection, but my Physics scores were always low.
I also think much of the software many of the members of this list have
provided to the community are truly pioneering efforts. Both the software
itself and packaging it for Debian to help the "average ham" to be able to
install it. That's impressive also.
I see *those* types of activities as the true ham pioneering spirit.
Helping keep a rag-tag group of RedHat boxes (sorry... it's what Dave used
as a standard before I could get to him! haha... but if it makes anyone
feel better most of the network is moving to using a RedHat-ized version of
apt-get for updates because other alternatives are too brain-dead!) running
that have radios hooked up to be keyed on their parallel ports, and audio to
their sound cards... I don't think that's pioneering. I doubt you do
either.
It's just fun with radios! And something to occupy my free-time with my
hobby I enjoy.
Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com - WY0X
p.s Some interesting scripts to integrate IRLP and APRS are starting to
emerge... a national trunking system that tracks users via GPSS and routes
the request to call them to the closest repeater automatically, perhaps?
Maybe we aren't as far behind as I thought... there's always hope! (GRIN)
And, of course, aprsd and IRLP can happily run on the same box...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hamish Moffatt" <hamish@debian.org>
To: <debian-hams@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 6:27 AM
Subject: Re: Announce: EchoLink Howto
> On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 11:20:16AM +0200, Michael Renner wrote:
> > EchoLink is software which allows Amateur Radio stations to communicate
with
> > one another over the Internet, using voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology.
>
> Do you call this amateur 'radio'?
>
>
> Hamish
> --
> Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
>
>
> --
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