Update - Canadian Radio Network

At our local ham radio club meeting at the beginning of the month, we were told of
a plan to start using radios with computers, which I assume includes Packet.
anyone who was interested was supposed to email their name, so I sent my name in
and hopefully this will get going soon. It sounded interesting, but it remains to
be seen whether this can be done with speech, or whehter I'm going to be SOL
again. With regard to Packet itself, although there is a lot of talk about it at
our meetings, etc., when Gary and I showed up for a meeting there wasn't one.
Subsequent enquiries elicited the info that it is not going at the moment. I
would have been more grateful if I had been told that in the first place, rather
than having to read misleading information on their web site, leading me to
believe that the Packet Group was at least meeting.

Then last Monday we went to the emergency preparedness meeting. At the moment the
focus seems to be on a patrol to watch over children at Halloween, but they did
have a guest speaker who spoke to us on the Anthrax situation. So far there have
been no cases in Canada, but fear is rampant here, and this guy is getting a lot
of calls which prove false for Anthrax. He then spoke about what one would have
to have in an emergency bag, which should be available in the event that a
disaster resulted in evacuation from one's home. that was all quite interesting,
and as usual, pinpointed just how unprepared we are here for any kind of disaster,
let alone a pole shift. I believe there was mention of some kind of course one
could take with regard to ham radio and emergency preparedness, which, of course,
is what I am trying to get into. I will look into this further.

Broadcasting: While I was taking a class for something else on our For-The-People
site, where we can talk to each other through the use of microphones and speakers,
I took the opportunity to ask about broadcasting. It appears that Live 365 is the
easiest way to go, but now they are charging a monthly fee (I believe it's $50.00
US) for use of their site. Not only that, but one of their rules is that you
can't represent any group. Now, whether a little talk show to the TT each week
could be classed as group representation might be another thing. We asked about
SHOUTcast, and apparently this is composed of "the big boys", those who know what
they are doing in the broadcasting arena and have big bucks to carry out their
desires. I asked what would happen if one had one's own broadcasting server, and
was informed that any ISP would be greatly unhappy with an arrangement like this,
because it would take up so much bandwidth. We all pushed for, and have been
promised, a class on setting up for broadcasting using the SHOUTcast server, or
maybe live 365; if anything useful comes from this, I will let you know. So far I
feel a bit stymied by this whole broadcasting thing. I can't get anywhere setting
up Winamp, mainly because technically, I don't know what to do.

IRLP--One thing that I have found this month which may be of interest to us is
something called the Internet Relay Link Protocol. This works using a 2-metre
radio. I think you can do it on UHF as well. It involves using repeaters to get
yourself around the world. Some guy in toronto the other night was talking to
another in Australia, which I thought was neat! The beauty of this is that you
don't have to have an advanced license to do this, and so of course it's getting
popular. this has been a fragmented month, since we have had two different sets
of people staying with us. The last person is due to leave tomorrow, and glad as
I am to have her, I will be even more glad to see her depart, so I can get back
and concentrate on my various projects. After she has gone, so some time this
week, I hope, I am going to ask my mentor, the guy who installed our radio
antenna, to come around and show me what I need to know to initiate this
around-the-world-with repeaters scenario. I'm not sure if repeaters have to be
opened up, or what has to happen to initiate this from my end. I could join a
link already in progress, but in the interest of talking to TT members without
their advanced licenses, I feel the need to find out how to do it myself. I will
keep you all updated on this, and I may even have some news for the next Board
meeting. It is certainly something on which we should keep a watch, if it can
really help us. I don't have an antenna of my own for my 2-metre radio, and if,
and only if, this can be used by TT, I may ask the nonprofit to help me buy one.
the one I have right now belongs to my mentor, but sooner or later, we are going
to have to give it back.

Best regards,
Shirley.