Adventure is just a PL Tone away - The Adventure Radio Protocol with George KJ6VU

So whether you're a regular listener or our first time guest , we're excited to have you here and appreciate your support and welcome . So let's get in today's show . I'm your host , eric call sign N1JUR , and my co-host that's around me are Todd W1STJ .

But , as always every month , we'll be hosting a live stream on our YouTube channel , and January is definitely moving pretty fast . So keep an eye on our socials and the Livfree and Hamcom website for more details so you can be part of that . And , as always , the road less traveled giveaway is still open , guys .

We've had a few folks enter , but definitely want to give more people opportunity to get in on the action and pick the dates . When you think Todd and I might get our dual kilo , you can always head over to Livfreeandhamcom and click the banner on the homepage to register . And for our new segment we are going to be kicking off .

And now for something a little extra with Todd W1STJ Alright , yes , you heard a little something extra here and we are going to help Todd get prepared to get his extra .

So , if you have been paying attention , there's a lot of other channels out there that are doing the extra before Easter over at the Ham radio clubhouse and a bunch of others are all encouraging folks to get out there , get upgraded , or maybe if you're sitting around you know , deciding whether you want to get your technician . We invite you to come play along .

So each week we are going to test Todd on his knowledge . And now over to our favorite VE quiz master , paul . Go ahead and take it .

C all these choices are correct . Or D , a space station , beacon station or telecommand station ? I'm going to say D .

C the control operators of all the stations in the system not authenticating the source from which they accept communications , or is it D the control operator of the packet bulletin board station B and B is correct . Two for two , todd Nice job .

Is the answer A yes , because the displayed frequency is within the 75 meter phone band segment B no , the sideband will extend beyond the edge of the phone band . Segment C no , us stations are not permitted to use phone emissions below 3.610 megahertz . Or D yes , because the DX station initiated the contact .

And because George is our guest here and the host of the ham radio workbench , he always knows he gets missed . So , george , what's been going on with your ham radio week this week ?

In a couple of weeks we have a few more shows in the queue between now and then , so that'll come out in February . Another thing is working on some of the new boards for the adventure radio protocol . We'll talk about that later .

And the last thing is I've started to take a deeper dive into Arden and Arden is very widely used here in the Willamette Valley of Oregon and so I now have a router up and running on a tunnel to the rest of the Arden network and a bunch of IP phones and some computers and this and that up and running at the house .

So I hope to get a decent dish antenna soon and do a little field testing to get into some of the higher access points .

Myself and a couple of the officers in the Flagge Torch Society have been playing with that , and other than the Ion 2G ALE it's just been trying to figure out XLX reflector stuff and getting a DMR to Fusion crossover and getting all that work , and it's certainly been a week of learning for sure .

So I'm pulling the box apart and bending new support brackets and everything else to make it fit . So that should be a nice , nice project to work on .

And then actually you know , new England is filled with a lot of old mill buildings and I found this company online that still is operational , that does special workbench construction for a lot of the manufacturing in the area and they have this one model for a tech workbench .

So I kind of sized it out for my little office down here and put out a quote to them , kind of figure out , you know , is it is well the budget , be within budget and make it reasonable . Or am I just kind of wishful thinking ? But I like their project or , you know , their product and it'd be pretty neat to put in the in the shack here .

They did tell me they were going to have it done by the end of the week and that didn't happen . But using this little app on my phone , which seems to be working pretty well , I was messing around with making what do you call profiles on my flex . So I made a single side band profile on for each band .

So that's pretty cool , because when you go from FTA it messes everything up and then you get adjust everything and it takes a while . Now I can just press about . You know , just click on it and I can go to 20 meters . 10 meters , I can do that when .

I did learn which is kind of cool is that when you do it on the on the flex radio , it also translates to your portable . So , like when I'm doing my iPad , the settings are already there . So it does go back and forth . So it's pretty cool . So I'm still working on it . I've been watching some videos and there's a lot more I can do .

I just did the very basic , but it's pretty simple and it works really well . So like if you're on FTA and you want to switch the side band and I want to go to 20 meters , I just go into the profiles and select 20 meters and all my settings for my 20 meter band is good to go .

I'm still working on the stream that I can do the very basics . So I've just been messing around and seeing how things go . So it's Not a lot of not a lot of operators , but kind of cold this week . So I was planning on doing a poda . I was going to try to go the rail trail but it just been kind of too cold . I want to go out there and freeze .

The bands were crazy busy , and so I kind of dabbled a little bit in both FTA and doing a lot of sideband contacts on 10 , picking up some stations that don't normally here , and so that was definitely fun .

And , just like Todd , I was , we'll say , flexing a little bit and my wife had a lot of people say , errands , and so I was driving the official chauffeur driving around .

So you know what better than to start working some , you know , contacts off the iPhone and whatnot , and that , just for me , is always a pure joy when I can , you know , you know , still play radio without having to dream about playing radio when I get home . So so it's a great , great fun and we all get a chance to benefit from that , I'm sure .

So we'll eventually , you know , have a go fund me going and we'll have to get Paul , you know , into the flex world eventually . He is the only one that's not a flex owner .

Yeah , true community . We'll have to figure out a remote place to put that up . I know a couple places in Maine that are definitely well worth it , so cool , all right . Well , so we've got a great guest on tonight , george , as we introduced KJ6VU .

He's the host of Ham Radio Workbench and he's on to talk about tonight something very specific that we all , you know , have learned and want to hear more about , called the Adventure Radio Protocol .

You know so , but before we kind of dive into that , we always like to hear from our esteemed guests , so you know a little bit about their Ham Radio story , you know , and how they got to , where they are and and we always you know that you know one of my favorite podcasts that I always have on the , you know the pod there is the Ham Radio Workbench , and

so if you haven't heard of it , then you know , as the saying goes , you got a lot of grass to mow . So , you know , make sure , you know you get that into your you know playlist there and and start playing catch up . But anyway , over to you , george .

So you know , go ahead , tell us a little bit about what's going on , and then you know your Ham Radio story a bit .

I got my novice ticket back in 1972 , which means I just passed my 50th anniversary as a ham a couple years ago .

I just love the idea of CW and I like the radios and and so that's that . And for someone who does a podcast , I don't like to talk on the radio a lot so . I'd prefer to talk with my fingers , you know with a key or a keyboard , and not like barking into the microphone , strangely enough . So I did that .

I got my technician license and got into FM and repeaters in the in the late 70s and had a membership in a really cool club building a lot of link repeater systems and there are a lot of fantastic mentors . That that taught me a lot about repeaters and radio technology and so , anyway , moved up to eventually get my , my extra .

But I mostly do a lot of building . I'm not a big operator . My favorite operating events field day . I love doing field day , but because that's like it's a camp out with radio . What could be better , you know ?

So for work I've been in the electronics business my whole career in in embedded systems design and went from being an engineer into more businessy kind of roles at software companies that make tools to do electronic design . So if you're going to make an integrated circuit you need all kinds of fancy software to make that work .

And so that was the industry that I I worked in for several decades . So along the way , on the side , I also produced a couple different ham radio products , so they're very nichey . So I've got a company called Sierra radio that makes repeater control systems . We basically make them almost on demand .

They really there's a whole story there , but it's it's not like a big business where we sell a ton of things , it's very specialized . And then I also have a little company called Pactenna and we make portable hf antenna . So my , my two big interests , as you could tell , is portable .

Operating and repeater systems are probably the two areas of my greatest focus , which is kind of possible to get Pactenna yeah , I know right , it's unobtainable at this point .

So now we're kind of digging our way out of that and we've got some things are in inventory . We still have a few more things to get , get back . But the funny thing is , when you start your own little business you think , well , I'd want this , who else would want this ?

And then you know people buy it and you go well , that must be everybody in the on the planet . Who's ever going to want to buy this thing ? And then more people are interested if you're lucky and and so we're lucky and there's been a lot of interest . But it's always a challenge to to make enough stuff good problem to have .

I know my background goes back to like 91 92 , so I sort of share in that same . You know I'm 30 years old , so you know , you know I see you've got a little bit more years on me but definitely a lot more experience for sure . And and you know your , your background , just in general , electronics just you know , totally blows my mind .

I mean , I did a little bit in high school and you know more software on my side . So it's always good to see you know that whole mix and being able to make that stuff work is just totally , you know , it blows all of our minds . Here we're just kind of all , like , you know , in awe of .

You know people will be able to create stuff like that and be able to , just , you know , get it working . So . So we applaud you on that one , so you know . So let's kind of talk a little bit about around the adventure protocol .

So I you kind of what led you towards this , to get going , and then you know , let's kind of dive in and level set a little bit of . You know what the adventure protocol is and and you know get in the nuts and bolts a little bit yeah , sure , so not surprising .

I've hiked a lot of the the Sierras in California , where I live most my life , and not in the Sierras , but hiked in the Sierras and backpacked and all that and you know , and I and being a ham and hiking , you know you're , you know you think , well , I should take my radio .

Now , for most of the years that I did that it was not really practical because the radios were big and in the power hungry and it just wasn't going to work . You know , nowadays , of course , there's so many fantastic little power QRP radios I mean now it's just amazing you can take with you .

So anyway , I I've done a lot of repeater building , I've designed to build a lot of repeater control systems , and also I'm very interested in using radio in the out of doors and and so there is a standard that's been around for a long time called the wilderness protocol , and the wilderness protocol basically says you can listen in on a couple different frequencies

on the hour , four times a day , if you have an emergency call to make , and and I always thought that was kind of a terrible method , honestly , I'm sure you know it's , it's kind of like it was a good thought but it was a very good , you know , detailed implementation .

So the the long story short is is I felt that it would be really useful if there was a standard around where you could hang out on the air and find other people who are doing other outdoorsy activities , so you can find them and talk to them , whether it's just for a conversation or making a soda contact or even an emergency , if you had some common place to

find people on the band and you had some signaling method to actually indicate you were there or that you have some traffic . So that kind of got me down the path of of defining what I came to call the the adventure radio protocol , which I can go into in more detail . But that's essentially the background and you know it's like a lot of things .

You start thinking about a problem . You know it'd be great if there was just a frequency where people would hang out . And then it's like , well , better than just a frequency . What if there's a way to like alert people ? Because I don't want to listen all day long and you know I don't want to leave the radio on blasting in my office . It .

People just chit chatting , but if somebody has an emergency or whatever , it'd be great to have some way to indicate that .

And then on it went from there , and so there's sort of feature creep set in until it turned into what is defined as the adventure radio protocol oh , very cool , so you could get a little kind of small slide presentation so we can kind of dive into that .

You know , in terms of talking a little bit about , but we figured you know for our audience and whatnot and what better than just you know if you haven't heard about this and and you know you want to learn more about this is perfect .

You know to kind of go , you know into a little bit more detail here , so we'll kick off the presentation there and let you kind of go from there .

Number one make it easier for radio operators to find and communicate with each other . Because after all , if you go hiking and you take your handy talkie with you , for example , and you don't pre coordinate with somebody else a frequency to meet on , well , where would you be ? Maybe on the local repeater ? What if you're in a valley ?

What if you're in a place where there's no repeater coverage ? Wouldn't it be nice if there is a watering hole where you can meet ? So so that would be helpful .

The second thing is , we want to be able to support multiple scenarios maybe an emergency call or just getting information , or to rally around on-air activities like soda , poda and other kinds of on-the-air activities , especially on the vhf and uhf bands .

And also , while we're at it , it'd be nice if we had a method to signal to other people that there's something going on if they're not even actively monitoring the radio , so that's an important aspect of this , trying to be very practical . So so what do you need ? So there's really three things you need , in my opinion , to kind of pull this off .

The first thing is you have to have a place on the band , you know . You have to have a common frequency to hang out on .

The second thing is you need to have a way to signal what's going on , and in in the case of this I I proposed that we used PL tones or ctcss tones for this purpose , and there's a good reason for that , and that is that every radio supports it .

So in the , in the , if you think about what's available on most radios , it's either PLncode , decode or dtmf are the only signaling methods .

And the problem with dtmf is that not every radio supports it , because if you go buy any i-com handy talky today does not have a dtmf pad on it , so your 500 beautiful id 50 , whatever handy talky , does not have a tone pad . You can pre-program memory channels with specific tone sequences , but that's cumbersome and it's not adequate . So dtmf is kind of not .

Is would be a good candidate , but it's really not the best thing . So the only thing is is a PL or ctcss and the other thing that's an advantage of that is there are several tones and every radio whether it's a $10 Chinese radio or a $500 Motorola radio or a $500 iCom or yese or whatever they all do tone in code decode .

So that is the common technology that they all share . The other thought is , is there's really at least two ways this could be done . One way , or mode , if you will , is Radio to radio communications . In other words , you don't need any infrastructure .

I can take any handy talkie that I own , and , eric , you can take any handy talkie you own , and we can agree on a common frequency and then we could use tones to Signal each other under various circumstances We'll get to in a moment here . So we don't need to buy anything . I mean , there's nothing you need to buy to make this work to start with .

In In addition to that , if you do want to make it a little bit more sophisticated and add infrastructure , you could do that . And well , what infrastructure would that be ?

And that's going to be remote sites like repeaters or remotely controlled Base stations that could be listening for traffic could be added to a network to make it even more useful , and we'll talk about those use cases here in a moment . So far so good , yeah , clear .

They're the most commonly used simplex frequencies on on six meters up to 23 centimeters . So 146 , 5 , 2 , 4 , 4 , 6 , dot 0 , 2 , 2 , 3 , dot 5 , etc . So right away the this protocol says you could be on one of five frequencies .

Now the reality is Probably 90% of the time you're going to pick 146 , dot 5 , 2 , so it maybe it's not a real big problem , but it doesn't help that there's five to choose from . Um , the next part about the wilderness protocol . That's kind of uh , not great is .

They recommend making calls at four specific times of the day At seven in the morning , 10 in the morning , 1 pm and 4 pm . On the hour , the first five minutes .

It means somebody has to be listening on one of those five frequencies those four times of the day actively to hear the call . Like , what are the odds ?

that . You go ahead , ryan , you got a question .

But we uh just recently , recently introduced , interviewed two gentlemen who kind of this whole scenario played out for them and they were using tones over a uh point-to-point frequency To because they were injured and got stuck out in the wilderness and they needed help . So it was a real life example that I think this would uh Help apply well , so .

Um , somebody else has to be listening like 24 hours a day to that frequency . Now , maybe in the case of five two , in certain areas that is the case , but maybe not if you , if you are on the receiving end of that Emergency call , that means you gotta leave your radio on all the time .

So , so , if , if we just said , look , if nothing else , if we just agreed on a particular pl tone , that would be an alert tone in the . In my proposal , by the way , I picked 67 hertz arbitrarily could have been anything . It's the first tone on the stack , so it's furthest away from what most people use .

So if we just said , look , you could chitchat all you want all day long on five two , simplex , but if anybody shows up with encoding 67 hertz , that means that they're trying to get a hold of somebody for help . Now what that means for me is my radio at home . I could leave on 24 , 7 Decoding 67 hertz .

I'll never hear anything , I won't hear the chitchat , but I will hear that person making the emergency call . So that that's the the most basic use case for the adventure radio protocol . Um , the second uh tone signaling technique that you you could find that's been used a little bit , not a whole lot is called a litz tone and litz stands for long tone zero .

So the idea here was that you'd have a dtmf tone decoder on your repeater system and or maybe on a box on your your home radio and it listens for the dtmf zero tone , but it has to be present for at least about 10 seconds for this to trigger . Now this gets back to the good old days of when we had dtmf pads .

Okay , that would work , but Again , my 500 icon radio doesn't have one of those and even if you programmed a zero into the memory . It can't send it for 10 seconds . It can send it for like 200 milliseconds .

So there are a lot of repeater controllers which implement lits as a decoded function , but it's not practical . Again for a bunch of reasons , including most handy talkies can't send it . So that that's kind of the downside there .

The other downside to wilderness or protocol or even the lits thing is Is that these are really like emergency call signaling kind of techniques . But there's a bunch of other use cases that would be nice to support that are not emergencies . In fact , if this was never used for an emergency , that would be okay .

And what I'm thinking about are things like Pota or or soda . So different parts of the country , ryan , you're talking about five two . Different parts of the country use 146.5 to have different conventions . So some parts of the country five , two . Well , everywhere it's the calling channel , but in some areas it's Inappropriate to rag chew on five two .

There's other parts of the country where they love to have you rag chew on five two , because otherwise nobody would be using the frequency . And you'll find these in different pockets and I've lived in different pockets where there's been different conventions .

So For things like soda activations having a different frequency , that would be the common hangout for doing , let's say , soda activations on vhf , which is not five two would be a good thing . So today there is no other frequency designated for that purpose .

So the wilderness protocol define will define a frequency and that would be perfectly Usable for making contacts like soda and pota contacts , um , and in fact it's encouraged , uh , to use that frequency for that kind of stuff . That way you completely get off of five two . So right , because anyway there's . There's other use cases as well .

So my main point here is Merchancies are one thing , but non-emergencies just chit chat is useful also . So if I go hiking by myself , I take my handy-talkie , I'll put it on the adventure frequency and listen there and maybe scan five two also , but I otherwise I wouldn't know what other frequency to listen to .

So that means that in other regions , like region one , they would have to come up with their own Frequency for that region . So , um , this is really a North America proposal . For this for the as far as the frequency goes . The rest is applicable . So why 146.58 ? Well , to some degree it's arbitrary .

Two meters is probably the best band , both from a propagation and you . You know , everybody's got a two meter radio right . Of course UHF would be the second best choice . But there's another reason to pick two meters , and that is if you pick two meters for this and UHF for your local repeaters , then they actually play together very nicely , so , um .

So then the question is well like why 5.8 ? And I'll go into that in a moment , but mainly it , the point is not to use 5.2 , because we don't want to , um , irritate people who have particular ways . They want to use 5.2 in their region . So it takes the traffic off to another frequency and doesn't bother anybody on 5.2 .

So every region's got a frequency coordinator , sometimes that they coordinate for one state , sometimes multiple states . Sometimes in California there's two frequency coordination Regions , so we actually have two states , not one from that perspective , and the band plans don't always agree .

So you want to find a frequency that exists in all of the band plans in all of the areas of the country . So that starts to knock out some of the frequencies . So we don't want to use , like 146.4 because it could be a repeater frequency 146.5.2 we talked about . We don't want to use it . So there's there's other that we could pick .

146.46 would be a good choice , 146.58 would be a good choice , etc . Now the downside to picking any one of these frequencies Is that every time I give this presentation , somebody says hang on , pides out , no . But no matter what frequency you picked , you'll hear the next phrase , which is that frequency is used by fill in the blank .

You know 146.58 is used by the , you know the uh , you know Poe , doncallo Aries Club .

You know it's like , well , okay , so there is no frequency I could possibly pick , that somebody wouldn't say , well , hang on , okay , right , um , those simplex frequencies are not coordinated , so they're kind of all fair game and , uh , you don't want to interfere with with people , of course .

But the fact of the matter is that that even Whatever frequency you pick , and even if some group of people use it , it's not like a repeater where it's there all the time and they're not actively using that frequency all the time .

By the way , if they are using that frequency especially for some emergency , well then you shouldn't be using the wilderness or , excuse me , the adventure radio thing . Anyway , you know you should like take your soda operation somewhere else while they're doing their drill or whatever they're doing .

You know Be be polite , so , um , so there could have been a few other choices , but I zeroed in on 5 8 . Now it turns out , weirdly enough , after I settle on that frequency , um , it turns out that there's parts of the country where they're actually using 146.58 for , uh , outdoors kind of activities .

Here in oregon A lot of the soda ops were already using that frequency .

Um , if there is a good reason to pick another frequency , that's fine , but I would stick with that at this point . I don't , I haven't heard a good argument to do something different . The other thing I would resist is the temptation to have different regions . You pick different frequencies , so you know that's .

That's suboptimum , because if you go to another part of the country it's nice to know , you know what frequency that's the same across the board , right , yeah , we're close to . You know , you don't , you don't want 20 different api rs channels .

That means there's 32 different Indications we can have . If you encode one of those 32 pl tones , it means something , so you can have 32 different messages if you will . And I think we should resist the temptation to overload this , and I think we want to keep it as simple as possible .

And so the the idea was what is the smallest number of pl tones that we could identify that have a specific use case and try to limit it to that ? And in fact some of these may not even be used in in an area . So the proposal has the following tones pre-assigned 67 hertz means that there's an emergency In process .

In other words , I need to get a hold of somebody . Now . I don't want to get too legalistic about what's an emergency . You know , if , if you feel that something is urgent enough to reach out to other people , to interrupt them , to tell them I need something need some help , then go for it , you know .

So it's not like a 911 call , but you know your emergency might be I broke my leg . My emergency might be I'm out of ice , so you can decide . You know where that line is . 77 hertz is a ping . We'll come back to what that means .

Um , and then I would actually conduct my my Soda activation or poda activation on that frequency . It's not to call on and move off , it's , you know , you're already moved off the national calling channel . You might as well stay there .

And by encoding 88.5 , what that signals is if anybody else is monitoring , if they're decoding 88.5 hertz , their radio will be silent until they hear me calling for a context .

So again , if you , if you want to encourage use of the channel , you want to have people be able to chit , chat back and forth , but I as a as a hunter , may not want to listen to hey , bob , bring some more ice back to camp . But as soon as you get on the air calling cq poda , I want to hear that .

So I'll just set my radio to decode 88 so I can selectively tune out everything else .

Nice okay 100 would be for general reg to , like you know , just trail chat this is a good place to say weeding worries and 123 would trigger an automated response from some kind of infrastructure which is , uh , in the same vein as 77 , and we'll talk about that in a little bit more .

So , um , so you can use 67 , 88 and 100 right now on your radio , just preprogram them into three channels all the same frequency . Each channel is a different tone and you're good to go . Um , there is a question about does the , does the , does the radio ? Should the radio , let's say your handy-talkie , be Only encoding , or encoding and decoding as well ?

Right ?

If you want to set up your radio at home to only listen for emergencies , then you set PLD code for 67 and you don't hear anything unless there's an emergency , etc . So whether you choose to have decode or not is totally up to your use case .

Now , for me personally , having built a lot of repeaters and stuff like that , I think , well , wait a minute , we're just getting warmed up , because what would be really useful is if we would extend the functionality to include some more automated alerting systems .

And what better way to do that than have repeater systems or other remote receivers be monitoring for some of this traffic , especially the emergency tone . Okay , so let's move forward a little bit .

So let me talk about 77 and 123 Hertz Now to build infrastructure and , for example , the repeater that I have here in the Willamette Valley , where it's a UHF repeater and we're adding a two meter remote base receiver transceiver to that repeater . On two meters It'll be on 146.58 and it'll be listening for these various kinds of tones .

Now you can build a control system that listens for these different tones and , depending on the tone it hears , it'll take some appropriate action . So how would this actually be built ? So normally , a repeater let's say UHF repeater has a receiver and a transmitter . The RF side goes into a duplexer , up the feed line to the antenna .

The radios also talk to a control system which takes the receive audio and processes it and puts it back into the transmitter , listens for carrier and when it hears a carrier or a tone then it turns on the transmitter and repeats the audio . So what would be adding to that is a second radio , let's say like a Motorola CDM 1500 series .

It's a perfect radio for this . It's industrial strength , easy to program , get to all the signals . You buy them for 100 bucks on eBay . That radio could be connected to the control system and that radio needs to have a special controller between the radio and the regular repeater that listens for these various PL tones . And you could build it yourself .

You can just take the protocol and go build your own hardware , or I'm building a controller that'll do this and we'll talk about that in a second here . So let me talk about it from a user point of view . When it be cool , you go on a trail , you're hiking along . One question I would have is is what kind of range do I have ?

Can other people hear me simplex , in which case I can make a call . You know with , let's say , 100 Hertz , the normal chit chat tone . But I would love to know if , in this area that maybe I've never been to if there are any repeaters in this area that could hear my signal .

Now the repeaters are not on 146.58 , normally they're on another channel , but I need a way to alert them . So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set the radio for 123 Hertz , press the button , transmit a carrier for a second and unkey and see if anything happens . So the way it works is the remote base or the repeater .

Remote base radio listens on this frequency , listens for all these different tones . If it hears 123 Hertz , that is a signal to the controller to send a message back to the person on two meters and that could be something like playing a wave file .

So I could record a wave file that says you've reached the New Hampshire repeater club , mount blah blah repeater site . We're on 440.5 megahertz , pl 100 . Some can message .

That little can message could live in a Raspberry Pi that's sitting in your controller and when the controller says , oh , I heard 123 Hertz , it turns on the two meter transmitter and plays that way file . Simple as that .

Now what's cool about that is , if you have access to the repeater , you can even send a different wave messages , like weather alerts , or you know it could be , it could change every day . You know what message you're sending .

So it's analogous to APRS , where in APRS you can , you can see the stations that are on in the area , so you know what you can connect to .

What I want to do in this case is I actually want the audio from that two meter receiver that had the 67 Hertz into it . I want that to light up my UHF repeater . And so if I'm listening to the UHF repeater I don't hear anything until somebody comes in on the two meter repeater with the right tone .

Then I can hear that voice coming out the UHF repeater and say hey , this is Bob W1 ABC . I have a problem . Could someone help me out ? And then on the UHF repeater you can go back and go into transmit mode and then transmit back on two meters to that person with their handy talky who has the problem . So , now you're using your two meter radio .

It's a remote base on your UHF repeater . That's really , I think , where it's powerful . The other thing that . But wait , there's one more thing . What are the odds that you're listening to the repeater 24 hours a day ? Probably zero , right . So maybe I'm lucky to hear the call because I was listening , but maybe not .

If my repeater is connected to , has an internet connection and let's say I detect 67 Hertz , in addition to turning on the connection to the repeater to pass the audio , I can have that little Raspberry Pi or whatever computer I'm using Send me a text message .

In fact , I could have a list of 20 people that when it hears an emergency call , these 20 people all get a text message . So the beauty of this is I don't ever have to listen to my repeater , but I may get a text that says there's emergency traffic on 146.58 .

So I may turn on my VHF radio or turn on the repeater and then turn the remote base on and listen and see what's going on . So I think this is really where the wilderness protocol kind of poops out , because there's no . You know how many of us listen 24 hours a day , like nobody .

But if you know , if at three in the morning or even three in the afternoon you have a problem , I want to be able to get through . So that's really where I think the power of this kind of idea starts to come into play .

And even as a pan radio operator ourselves , we just don't spend time , you know , in front of our radios every you know day , like we used to .

So if I can provide you a way to indicate that there's some traffic on the frequency , a particular tone , you do whatever you want . I mean , I'm just suggesting the , you know , the remote based transceive thing , or the texting , or you know you can . I'm sure other people look at this and come up with 10 other things that are really cool .

You know that they might want to do . So that's the essential idea . So before I got too excited about publishing the spec for all this , I wanted to actually make sure that you could actually build a thing and make it work . So the point is that the protocol definitions published , that's just out in the public domain . Anybody can build the hardware .

But since I built a lot of repeater controllers and I basically use the same kind of stuff you put in a repeater controller , I just went ahead and build a controller to do this . So again , this is only if you're using it in the infrastructure mode , not the radio to radio mode . You don't need any of this stuff .

So if you're a repeater owner and you want to add this feature to your repeater besides the radio itself , you need a piece of hardware that sits in between that radio and the rest of the repeater system . So I made this little board here . It's about about four by six ish inches and it does everything that we talked about already .

So basically it listens to a receiver signal . It scans for all the PL tones . When it detects a PL tone it either takes an action or reports what tone was decoded to an external device like a computer . There's a little LCD you can put on there to actually see what it says , if you like . It sends the data over serial port .

They could go to Raspberry Pi or whatever computer you got . There's some GPIO triggers to trigger an event on the Raspberry Pi . The board also has a DTMF decoder built into it . Even though DTMF is not part of the protocol , you could add non essential functionality beyond the PL tone signaling by adding DTMF if you want to .

The only downside is not everybody could use it because , again , $500 , I can't ever use it . But for the other half of the radios out there that do have DTMF pads , you could add additional functionality , wow . So that's all built into this board . But of course , feature Creep doesn't stop there , not with George .

So then , oh , by the way , one other thing I want to mention this board . I wrote the firmware for the board to do the ARP stuff , and once that was all up and running , I thought you know , I actually need a repeater controller for my repeater .

So I added a bunch of other functionality , because all the hardware to make a single port controller is in here , to make a repeater controller . To do a repeater controller , you need PL decoding , which most controllers , by the way , don't have .

You need PL decoding , you need DTMF decoding , you need PL filtering , you need audio mixing , you need level setting , you need CWID , all that stuff , and so I added all that code into this . So there's a dip switch on this board . When you power up the board , if the dip switch is in one position , it comes up as an adventure radio controller .

If you power it up in the other position , it comes up as a repeater controller . So , there's no difference in the hardware . All the firmware for both is built in , so you don't have to change the firmware , it just changes its personality when it boots up . Ok , so that was that . So the next thing is well , that project is done .

But I want to add the Raspberry Pi to this . So I thought well , actually what I really need to do is make this multi-ported . So I designed a three-port motherboard . So I don't have a photograph on it , but you can see it here . So this is a three-port motherboard . The idea is that normally you use this by itself .

You just stick this in the box and off you go .

Your repeater and your remote base are all there , ready to go . You don't even need a repeater controller , because this becomes it . And then there's a third port . That third port could be another one of these ARP controllers , maybe to hook up your All-Star computer to that port . So now you got repeater , you got two meter remote base . You got All-Star .

I've run this like this and there's not a lot of demand on the processor . It's basically sitting there all the time and mainly what it's doing is it's listening for one of the GPIO pins to be pulled from the ARP controller or there's a serial port , so it's also listening on the serial port for a command .

And so it's idle essentially all the time , so it really doesn't draw a lot .

You don't need to use a Pi or you don't need to put on this board , because the connection to the Pi is either just a GPIO pull that comes off of the board or the serial interconnect between the boards . There's an I2C bus and there's also an RS-45 bus , and the easiest way to control it is over the RS-45 bus .

So you could take any PC that you've got , like a NUC or a tower or a blade or whatever you got . You could just stick a USB to 45 dongle into it and take the two wires and just screw it into the terminal on the other board and you're hooked up to it .

I mean you could write a little program to send a bunch of macros and things like that , but all of the configuration commands come through the serial port . Got it Okay .

I think it depends on what the demand is . So if people want to build their own hardware , that's great , you know , or I'll probably provide hardware one form or another . So I would say that up to now it's mostly been word of mouth where , like you know , josh pinged me and said hey , that's interesting , I'm going to talk about it .

Same thing on the workbench . You know I haven't been talking about it too much , so I've done . You know I have a dozen different like club presentations to talk about the idea and as much as anything else . See if people are interested . You know , sometimes you come up with an idea and you think like I think this is a great idea .

But am I the only person you know that thinks it's a great idea ? And you know you keep yourself . But I've gotten a lot of serious interest .

In fact , even here in Oregon I've got several of repeater owners who who have expressed interest to the point that that they're starting to point out , well , like what if we have several repeaters running this thing and someone hits the information button and our 10 repeaters going to light up and be you know , clogging the same frequency , like , oh , that's a good

problem . Yeah , I didn't thought of that . So , so that there's been quite a bit of interest . So I think I'll , once I finish off the , the , the final version of all the boards , which is probably in a few months , then I'll start doing more promotion of this idea .

But there's a website , so there's adventure radioinfo that you can go to and that's where I publish all of the specs .

I love it , and especially up here . Nine times out of 10 cell phones aren't an option . So I've always got my radio and I'll do channel one you know 14652 and I'll do channel two , four , four , six , and you know , just kind of try and monitor both . But this , this really is a no brainer , right ? If you're an avid outdoorsman , it's easy .

Just throw these you know four or five frequencies into your radio . They're there . You can scan them if you want . Don't scan them if you don't want . So my , my question for you is is the infrastructure where , where you're going to have the biggest roadblocks ?

And it's not for everybody and that's fine , but there should be one or two high level repeaters or some low whatever , and there should be a few repeaters in every region that do this .

Trying to convince a bunch of hams to agree on anything is a fool's errand , and and I honestly don't I've sort of been around a ham radio stuff long enough to know that that I could spend the rest of my life trying to convince people to build this into the repeater , and I really don't need that frustration .

You know , either people get the idea and go , yes , we're going to go do that , or like tell me again , like , are you still doing that ? And so I'm really not overly concerned about pushing that and trying to achieve that .

Frankly , if the only thing that we achieve by this is we get people to program this frequency and a couple of these tones in their radio to just chat , chat , simplex , and there's zero infrastructure , that's fine by me . I mean we'll . We'll still be ahead of the game . At that point I think we'll have , we will have achieved the base goal right there .

So I think that's , that's fine . Now , having said that , I think it would be a very big missed opportunity if we don't try to get these kind of systems in some repeaters in areas especially where there's active outdoorsy activity , and that's where it makes the most sense is where we have a lot of active outdoor ham radio operators like yourself .

You know it's . It's really going to be a groundswell thing , like when I start talking about this here in Oregon . Well , guess what ? There's a whole lot of people that do a lot of outdoorsy stuff in Oregon . I mean , that's one reason we live here , and and so the local soda guys were like that's a great idea .

One second Is that on the air , yet , you know right . So I mean I can see pole in certain regions pretty quickly .

And I think what's going to happen is it'll be someone who is like hey , you know , I'm pretty active outdoor , you know whether it's hiking or four wheeling or whatever , and I this would be a great project for our club who have a repeater and let's just make this happen . And I think it'll just happen organically .

But I'm not going to lose sleep over , not that not happening , but I sure hope it does .

So if I'm on the user side , one option is you know we're chatting and all of a sudden the third voice shows up unannounced and then like well , you know maybe that's a guy and there's a repeater . You know where's it come from .

Now what I would do is I would configure it so that when that guy's carrier drops on the two meter receiver it inserts a special tone . So I know that , oh , that's coming in from that port . So that's an emergency call . So that's another option .

Another option is is you can also have the repeater controller light up the repeater and send a tone but not pass audio . So if you as the control operator or user of the repeater would have to go in and DTMF connect to that remote based radio . So you know any of those things , it's a by policy of what you want to do more than anything else .

So what's going to happen is is you guys are chit chatting on the repeater and then the the two meter ARP radio lights up , connects the audio through and so it mixes the audio together .

So essentially you have a you have an audio mixer that takes your repeater receiver audio and the ARP to meter repeater or to meter remote based audio , mixes them together and sends that audio to your transmitter . And there has to be a way to mix that audio in , and that that's one of the other I didn't mention here , but that's one of the other .

If you , if you use , like like my Sierra radio system , repeater controllers are multi ported controllers and they're built to be able to handle this sort of thing , naturally . So you can plug in another board and you get another port in the mixer .

But I'm also going to build a little inexpensive board that lets you just intercept the receive audio and mix in another audio source and send that the transmitter . I mean , it's a very simple circuit .

Our club has a repeater and it's it's used by all of us . You know , throughout the day we do a nightly net . So like , let's say , there was an emergency on the net and someone reached it and said , hey , we're stuck up on one of our local mountains . That would be amazing to be able to do that , because then , right then in there , you could take action .

You wouldn't have to be monitoring that frequency . It's not a frequency that everyone uses . So , yeah , that's a brilliant idea . I mean , I'm totally on board . It's it seems .

And now when I go in on UHF I also come out on two meters . So depending on the repeater controller , if it's a fancy one , then you could do all those things .

If you have like a inexpensive single port baby repeater controller , which many people do , then you have to take a little bit different tack because you have to add a mixer in that audio chain and then everything else is handled on my board except intercepting the audio .

He was on a local like the Appalachian Trail and some out west , but he got lost or cold and he ended up unfortunately dying . But it would have been really good if he was able to reach out on a ham radio , to a , to a local repeater that's being used , you know , on a regular , on a regular basis .

So yeah , I mean there's tons of use for it Is there .

because you know , growing up I remember very much the repeater used to be the hub of everything and people , would you know , gather around it like it was the , you know the , the family campfire per se . So that's kind of faded a bit now you're kind of bringing that back to the foreground and most people are just really looking at this .

So my question I guess would be is that you have the ability to be able to expand per se like into the all star worlds and other you know kind of digital modes and stuff like that Is there ? Does your current spec have the capabilities to , say , passing that information off into you know the other types of networks , so you kind of broaden your reach ?

In fact , a good friend of mine , eric Forza , when you G he pinged me after he watched my thing with with Josh and said why don't you just put up remote two meter transceivers and all star and forget the repeater ?

But but but yeah , I mean you can have like at your house , you can put a transceiver in an all star node and backhaul it to the to the internet and , if you have , you can imagine a network where you have multiple nodes hub together on an all star hub . Yeah , that network .

That then you know you could be list people could just be listening there , or or have , or you can take this . I'm also making one . You'll be able to hook up to a transceiver at your house . So because the one thing that this does that's kind of unique is it scans for the PL tone .

Normally PL decoders , you set the tone you want to look for and it tells you if it's there or not . So the hardware in here I didn't really talk about it , but the PL tone decoder in here scans the audio passband and it looks for all of the . Actually the looks for about 20 of the PL tones and when it sees one it tells you which one it found .

So we could easily have that set up to talk to an all star node and send that data somewhere else , or you can have it on your on the receiving end on your computer with an audio filter and scan it on your computer . Audio I mean there's . There's like so many things you could do with this .

And you know this would be phenomenal to be able to have everybody in that network to be able to just , you know , piggyback off of it and be , you know , able to respond to , obviously , emergency events .

But I could see the super benefit of the podicide of things , because I can't tell you how many times I go out here in five to and it's like chirping , you know I , you know I have to like text people on discord and other things , say , hey , you know , I'm out here in five to because let's make a contact , which is kind of like , you know , not the right

way to do it in my mind , but it's the only way to really get people's attention , because nobody really listens to five to , even though they're all of us have it in our scans and whatnot . So , yeah , this , this definitely , you know it peaks my interest and you know I'm all on board , which sounds like a lot of these guys are as well .

But like , if you went to this , you know this , this ski lodge people and say we want to put a repeater on the top of Iran , they're like you know , okay , that you need a building and power and you know , but if you can go in with with a two meter transceiver and this little controller and you could in a raspberry pine , you could Wi-Fi that somewhere ,

and now you have a remote transceiver , not just receiver but transceiver . So you know you could , you could be sitting at home and you get an alert that hey , someone's on the emergency tone . You could just , you know , through all star route to that remote transceiver and chitchat with them , you know , live on the radio .

So to me , like that , that sort of use case I think is interesting because that's a case where you don't even have to rely on repeater infrastructure . You can use other . You know you could be at the bottom of a valley , but if the Forest Service Building is at the bottom of the valley , where there's a visitor center , you can stick one there , you know ?

I mean and we're not talking about let's wheel in a six foot rack . You know , it's like a package . That's about that big . You don't need a whole lot . Put it at your house .

So you know , is there any other kind of last minute things you want to share with us , George , about ? You know , the venture protocol or anything kind of , obviously maybe to the boards themselves , as if I was , you know , ready to pass the money over to you . Are you ready to do that ? Or kind of where's that that in this process ?

So so the thing to do is follow along on our website it's adventure radio dot info , and that's where I'll be publishing all the information about this and we'll be talking about it on the hand ready workbench podcast from time to time . But the quick , quickest way to get the info is just to go to adventure radio dot info .

My guess is , I'm hoping to have either boards or assembled units this year , at the latest boards for sure , probably in q2 . If we do assemble things , it'll probably be q2 to q3 .

And , as their motto says , you know , you can definitely mo acreage of lawns and short amount of time when listening to the hammer radio podcast . So hammer your workbench podcast . So so with one final thing , george , what's the easiest way to obviously people reach out to you if they want to learn more about this or if they're repeat owners ?

I want to be able to get more info on this . What's the best way to get a whole of you ?

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