2025-11-07 — A Remarkable Amateur Radio Presentation - LinHT at OpenAlt 2025 by Vlastimil Slinták OK5VAS, Retreating from Repurposing Existing Repeaters, Stixs Radio, Vibraphone, FreakWAN
I also just renewed my ARRL membership (for one year). Not that they offer anything on the website that I use (I don't even find the magazine useful), but rather because they are the only organization that I am aware of that is doing political lobbying to help preserve our access to spectrum. Thank you for mentioning a few of their additional political efforts that I wasn't aware of.
Dj - As I hope I conveyed, I was a bit surprised that the ARRL demonstrated enough value to earn my membership renewal. "Lobbying to save our [Amateur Radio] spectrum" has always been a bit nebulous to me, but seeing the specific actions I named (and seeing them as direct observations, not second or third hand) was enough.
OK, color me skeptical on mesh on VHF / UHF. I know, it has all of the buzz, but it feels to me like AX.25 all over again.
I still think your repeater idea has some merit, particularly in areas where there are mountains and mesh would require lots of nodes between where I am and where I want to send data, but a mountain top repeater provides relay. Then again, the only repeater I own is portable for GMRS, so I can't do data on it...
I am pleased to see people excited about meshtastic though and AREDN seems to be rolling out in lots of areas which is a win!
Bill - We're in violent agreement that repeaters are the preferred way to do Amateur Radio networking over a wide area. But many of the good locations for Amateur Radio repeaters are "spoken for", as are many of the repeater frequency allocations.
My observation, from years of trying now, is that voice (including digital voice) repeater owners like things the way they are, even if that is that their repeater is almost entirely unused... and thus no interest in converting to a SuperPeater or allowing it to be used as-is for data (such as VARA FM).
In the absence of access to repeaters, either "converted" conventional repeaters, or lacking the means to put up a new SuperPeater or conventional repeater dedicated to data, we're left with Mesh Networking, with perhaps some fallback to doing the wide area networking via Internet. Note that all Internet is created equal; I'm going to try doing "Internet" networking via my new Starlink Mini, trying to bridge to other mesh systems using Starlink's native IPv6. Starlink is pretty robust compared to terrestrial Internet, both mobile networks and wireline networks. If I can keep it powered, it's generally going to keep working.
Minor correction... your GMRS repeater CAN "do data" such as VARA FM or slower packet radio, as can any FM repeater. It's just not currently ALLOWED for GMRS repeaters to be used for data such as VARA FM.
I suspect that eventually someone is going to capably petition the FCC for a rules change to allow data on GMRS (and FRS, and CB, and MURS [all the channels]) because... why not? Local conditions / need / use cases, etc.
Yes we are in agreement. My note on GMRS is just acknowledging that the rules prohibit my doing data. Yes I'm well aware of Vara's abilities (and Ribbit, etc).
Also on StarLink mini - I took mine to support the Bear 100 Ultra Marathon this year and it was game changing.
When people asked where runners were I could get the answer in a minute or two, which used to take several minutes for winlink emails to exchange. The bandwidth was enough and low enough latency that I actually had several runner support teams use my cell phone to make coordination wifi calls over the StarLink (it worked tons better than my old GlobalStar phone I used to pay a fortune to use). And we pivoted largely to sending our WinLink updates over WiFi because there we no contention for the packet nodes.
But, on the down side, it gobbled power. I ended up running a generator all day because the continuous 90 watt power draw vs a 2 meter radio that did 2 watts 80 percent of the time and 50 watts for 20 percent. In previous years we ran the whole station on pre charged deep cycle batteries, but I'll have to almost double the capacity to do StarLink next year.
I start to wonder if public service events will walk away from us cranky ham radio operators and shift to just using Starlink. StarLink worked in a slot canyon miles from any cell service, an aid station that only ham radio worked at. I think it's wonderful we have the options, but I do wonder where we flex in the future based on the new capabilities meshed LEO satellites are giving us.
Future looking comment, when Blue Origin and SpaceX have fully reusable launchers, the price to LEO might make it practical for us to develop our own LEO mesh for ham radio, that would be very fun to explore!
One idea I'm going to see if I can get people thinking about this next year is talking the Utah VHF society into advocating using full CTCSS rather than PL on repeaters. Then with the right controller we could do data repeating on the voice channel without people having to listen to it... It would narrow the data channel a little, but, I think it's better to assume that you don't have the lower 250 hz available anyway, and that portion doesn't offer a lot of speed anyway since it can only support about a 100 baud sub carrier on a perfect channel.
Bill - Unless my understanding is incomplete, PL is just another (originally, Motorola's trademark, now in the public domain) name for CTCSS. In stating "full" CTCSS, I think you mean transmitting CTCSS as well as requiring CTCSS to trigger a repeater. It's my guess that a Tone Burst activation would be even better than CTCSS as it's brief and then allows the full "input" audio bandwidth of the repeater to be used. But VARA FM (and probably any systems that follow) doesn't seem to be adversely affected by CTCSS, so the use of tone burst probably isn't worth pursuing.
I can attest that TRANSMITTED tone burst works well. For a while I was monitoring a Hytera UHF repeater that was usable for both DMR and FM, and it was annoying to listen to the DMR transmissions on my FM radio, so I set the radio to decode the transmitted CTCSS and voila! no more listening to the DMR transmissions.
In a SuperPeater (or perhaps just "advanced" repeater controllers), different use cases would be enabled by different CTCSS / DCS / Tone Burst activations of the repeater. In a SuperPeater, the receive would "sort it out" by simultaneous decodes of the high bandwidth bitstream. If the "FM / DMR / M17 voice decoder" locks up on a transmission, the speaker opens up with the decoded audio. If "9600 data" is decoded, that gets routed to the "data" subsystem of the receiver. Etc.
I also just renewed my ARRL membership (for one year). Not that they offer anything on the website that I use (I don't even find the magazine useful), but rather because they are the only organization that I am aware of that is doing political lobbying to help preserve our access to spectrum. Thank you for mentioning a few of their additional political efforts that I wasn't aware of.
Dj - As I hope I conveyed, I was a bit surprised that the ARRL demonstrated enough value to earn my membership renewal. "Lobbying to save our [Amateur Radio] spectrum" has always been a bit nebulous to me, but seeing the specific actions I named (and seeing them as direct observations, not second or third hand) was enough.
I got the same Starlink mini offer. Since I was planning to get one for the RV regardless, it works out great.
That’s pretty cool. Would work great to relay last mile ham digital comms.
Now sending $25/month to M17 for LinHT. I'll think about the ARRL thing. -Joe w7com
Uncle - As I said, opinions can easily differ. Thanks for supporting M17 with monthly donations!
Thank you!
OK, color me skeptical on mesh on VHF / UHF. I know, it has all of the buzz, but it feels to me like AX.25 all over again.
I still think your repeater idea has some merit, particularly in areas where there are mountains and mesh would require lots of nodes between where I am and where I want to send data, but a mountain top repeater provides relay. Then again, the only repeater I own is portable for GMRS, so I can't do data on it...
I am pleased to see people excited about meshtastic though and AREDN seems to be rolling out in lots of areas which is a win!
Bill - We're in violent agreement that repeaters are the preferred way to do Amateur Radio networking over a wide area. But many of the good locations for Amateur Radio repeaters are "spoken for", as are many of the repeater frequency allocations.
My observation, from years of trying now, is that voice (including digital voice) repeater owners like things the way they are, even if that is that their repeater is almost entirely unused... and thus no interest in converting to a SuperPeater or allowing it to be used as-is for data (such as VARA FM).
In the absence of access to repeaters, either "converted" conventional repeaters, or lacking the means to put up a new SuperPeater or conventional repeater dedicated to data, we're left with Mesh Networking, with perhaps some fallback to doing the wide area networking via Internet. Note that all Internet is created equal; I'm going to try doing "Internet" networking via my new Starlink Mini, trying to bridge to other mesh systems using Starlink's native IPv6. Starlink is pretty robust compared to terrestrial Internet, both mobile networks and wireline networks. If I can keep it powered, it's generally going to keep working.
Minor correction... your GMRS repeater CAN "do data" such as VARA FM or slower packet radio, as can any FM repeater. It's just not currently ALLOWED for GMRS repeaters to be used for data such as VARA FM.
I suspect that eventually someone is going to capably petition the FCC for a rules change to allow data on GMRS (and FRS, and CB, and MURS [all the channels]) because... why not? Local conditions / need / use cases, etc.
Yes we are in agreement. My note on GMRS is just acknowledging that the rules prohibit my doing data. Yes I'm well aware of Vara's abilities (and Ribbit, etc).
Also on StarLink mini - I took mine to support the Bear 100 Ultra Marathon this year and it was game changing.
When people asked where runners were I could get the answer in a minute or two, which used to take several minutes for winlink emails to exchange. The bandwidth was enough and low enough latency that I actually had several runner support teams use my cell phone to make coordination wifi calls over the StarLink (it worked tons better than my old GlobalStar phone I used to pay a fortune to use). And we pivoted largely to sending our WinLink updates over WiFi because there we no contention for the packet nodes.
But, on the down side, it gobbled power. I ended up running a generator all day because the continuous 90 watt power draw vs a 2 meter radio that did 2 watts 80 percent of the time and 50 watts for 20 percent. In previous years we ran the whole station on pre charged deep cycle batteries, but I'll have to almost double the capacity to do StarLink next year.
I start to wonder if public service events will walk away from us cranky ham radio operators and shift to just using Starlink. StarLink worked in a slot canyon miles from any cell service, an aid station that only ham radio worked at. I think it's wonderful we have the options, but I do wonder where we flex in the future based on the new capabilities meshed LEO satellites are giving us.
Future looking comment, when Blue Origin and SpaceX have fully reusable launchers, the price to LEO might make it practical for us to develop our own LEO mesh for ham radio, that would be very fun to explore!
One idea I'm going to see if I can get people thinking about this next year is talking the Utah VHF society into advocating using full CTCSS rather than PL on repeaters. Then with the right controller we could do data repeating on the voice channel without people having to listen to it... It would narrow the data channel a little, but, I think it's better to assume that you don't have the lower 250 hz available anyway, and that portion doesn't offer a lot of speed anyway since it can only support about a 100 baud sub carrier on a perfect channel.
Bill - Unless my understanding is incomplete, PL is just another (originally, Motorola's trademark, now in the public domain) name for CTCSS. In stating "full" CTCSS, I think you mean transmitting CTCSS as well as requiring CTCSS to trigger a repeater. It's my guess that a Tone Burst activation would be even better than CTCSS as it's brief and then allows the full "input" audio bandwidth of the repeater to be used. But VARA FM (and probably any systems that follow) doesn't seem to be adversely affected by CTCSS, so the use of tone burst probably isn't worth pursuing.
I can attest that TRANSMITTED tone burst works well. For a while I was monitoring a Hytera UHF repeater that was usable for both DMR and FM, and it was annoying to listen to the DMR transmissions on my FM radio, so I set the radio to decode the transmitted CTCSS and voila! no more listening to the DMR transmissions.
In a SuperPeater (or perhaps just "advanced" repeater controllers), different use cases would be enabled by different CTCSS / DCS / Tone Burst activations of the repeater. In a SuperPeater, the receive would "sort it out" by simultaneous decodes of the high bandwidth bitstream. If the "FM / DMR / M17 voice decoder" locks up on a transmission, the speaker opens up with the decoded audio. If "9600 data" is decoded, that gets routed to the "data" subsystem of the receiver. Etc.