Foundations of Amateur Radio

Recently I explored the nature of amateur radio emergency response. I received a few replies providing an insight into the on the ground reality and it encouraged me to dig into this a little more.

I'll start with some context.

Early in my amateur adventures I became aware of the Wireless Institute of Australia's efforts in encouraging people to become familiar with emergency procedures. It introduced a course titled "Introduction to Public Safety Training for Radio Amateurs", specifically to achieve a Certificate II in Public Safety.

I dutifully downloaded the materials, went to my local office supply store and had the documents printed out. The bill was hundreds of dollars as I recall, as much as I paid for my new FT-857d, because the dozens of PDF documents had little colour logos scattered throughout, because of course they did.

After getting over the bill shock, I discovered that you could only do this course if you had an advanced amateur license. Not that this requirement makes any sense, since you're not operating on amateur radio frequencies or using amateur radio equipment, but I digress.

To add insult to injury, today I dug up that 2011 manual, well, one of the four volumes sitting on my shelf, and discovered that for example, the module for "Communication in the Workplace" is actually a standard training module offered throughout Australia.

In other words, the Wireless Institute's attempt at linking amateur radio to emergency response was a set of training modules that made you into an Emergency Communications Officer with, I might add, no guarantee of engagement by your local emergency service. As far as I can tell, this is no longer offered but the evidence shows that it continues to shape amateur radio emergency policy a decade and a half later.

I set out to discover if things had improved, starting with a search for "WICEN procedures", WICEN being the Wireless Institute Civil Emergency Network, the equivalent of ARES, the Amateur Radio Emergency Service in the United States, RAYNET, Radio Amateurs Emergency Network in the United Kingdom, DARES, Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service and many others.

I was pleasantly surprised to find many pages with results. Less pleasant was to discover that many, if not most of them, hadn't been updated since 2011, that's if they were dated at all.

As an aside, dating this kind of information is in my opinion crucial. A list of repeater frequencies is absolutely irrelevant if it's more than a year old, but if the information has no date, you have no idea if you're dealing with a current list or one written when Netscape was still in business.

For example, the WICEN Tasmania (South) website has lots of information, but there's absolutely no indication of how old it is, unless you take the "Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported" in the header as a sign that it was last updated before 2017 when Flash was depreciated. Their "Equine Endurance Ride Tracking" has a version number, but no indication of when it was updated. I did find a Voice Procedure Training Module dated 16 June 2011, so that's something.

Lest you think I'm picking on Tasmania, WICEN Victoria has plenty of information, all dated 2011, well, apart from the 1994 and 1998 manuals. WICEN Bundaberg has information, at least some of it dated, but published in August 2012. WICEN WA has a snazzy website which contains the outlines of something, but it's unclear where it's at and their homepage states that it's in a "rebuilding phase".

I'll note that the main wicen.org.au domain links to eight WICEN organisations, but the list is nascent at best and while it serves as the Australian WICEN landing page, it has no other information. Not even the Wireless Institute itself provides a full list of its own WICEN affiliated clubs and associations.

Age and accuracy aside, one thing all these results appear to have in common is the unstated burning desire to become official Emergency Communications Officers, with instructions on pro-words, standard phrases, voice procedures and integration with the rest of the official Emergency Communication community.

While I get that this was the Wireless Institute aim back in 2011, is that still relevant today? Is being a radio amateur the starting point for becoming an operator in an emergency radio bunker, or is that a parallel path that radio amateurs might take?

Let me be explicit here. Are we as radio amateurs best suited to train other radio amateurs to become certified State Emergency Service volunteers, or should we join the local SES and participate in their training?

It goes back to the underlying premise and its current implementation, such as it is, amateur radio's attempt at claiming an emergency communications role in order to justify its use of radio spectrum.

Don't get me wrong. I have no beef with providing emergency communications, but effectiveness is important. Volunteer hours are a strictly limited resource and it seems to me that the path we've been on since at least 2011 is attempting to duplicate an existing system with, I suspect, very limited real world application.

So, what should we do about it?

Although it's incomplete, undated and without version numbers, the WICEN WA website has a list of how emergency communications are activated, who does what and when and in which order. That's the only place I've ever seen such a list. It's a start.

It appears that some parts of WICEN are attempting to roll out a permanent HF data network. The choice of band is curious, 80m, a band not known for local communications, daytime communications, or small and easily deployable antennas, ask any portable operator.

In contrast, the Philippine Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network, PAREDN or DX1PRD, uses 2m and 70cm for most of its network which also has an active status dashboard, something which I have yet to discover anywhere in Australia.

Within the various emergency systems across the globe, two proprietary tools seem to have taken hold, Winlink and VARA. The first providing a mechanism for message exchange with an associated global network of receivers, the latter a way of transmitting it across radio. Together they claim to provide the basics of a parallel Internet for "when the Internet goes down, mobile phone networks fail or natural disasters isolate communities". Frankly, bandwidth considerations alone will reveal that it's the same kind of absurd claim that the ARRL made famous: "When all else fails"

The tools, Winlink and VARA, are claimed to be cross-platform, but all links supplied by WICEN sites I found are for Windows only, closed source, or worse, stuck behind a user account login.

There are efforts underway for open source replacements for both VARA and Winlink, according to GitHub both replacement projects started in 2023, but this software is in active development and I see little evidence of wide adoption of either at this stage, that's not to say it won't be, just that it isn't yet. As soon as the proprietary tools change protocol, these projects will stop working until the new protocol has been reverse engineered. Hardly a recipe for robustness.

In case you think this is a new effort, the WICEN Victoria website has Winlink presentations as recent as 2012.

I'll leave you to contemplate if any of this makes sense.

Unrelated, I'm recovering from a cold and some wondered recently if I was experimenting with voice cloning. It's a question that's been put to me in other forms as well, several people over the years articulating that they thought I was a bot.

Let me point out that the whole point of my contribution here is to learn, document and share it with you. If I used Assumed Intelligence, or AI, and Unsupervised Text Extruders, or LLMs to do that, there's no learning for me and subsequently no reason for spending time with you.

As an aside, I tend to use "my cat" as a phrase to replace any instance of OpenAI, Anthropic, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Co-pilot and based on the growing list of companies focused on this, I find it helps retain my sanity.

I'll leave you with a question.

While the WIA claims that WICEN is "totally independent from the WIA", even though it obviously has its fingerprints all over it, who is running this show and perhaps more importantly, who is helping?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB