Greg, W0GSK, captured these notes from our meeting.
On Saturday Sept 5th we met at the Linn County EMA building for our monthly meeting that happens the first Saturday of the month.
At the end of June we supported the CVARC / CARC Field Day operations providing network between the logging stations. KD0CGN built a system where one laptop acted as a “server” for all of the DXLog stations. From that server there was a connection back to his QTH where a Python web app was able to take the recorded contacts and map them with their QRZ information. Please visit https://fieldday-ops.hosted-by.me/map to view the map and record of our contacts.
July was a short planning meeting for HAM Fest. Then we went outside to view KC0RFN’s 48 foot tower that he’s out fitting for AREDN and eventually a UHF mobile repeater setup.
August was HAM Fest. There was a table setup by KF9MT whom held discussions with those that passed by.
Topics that we covered included:1.) Especially for you race (EFY) coming up next month2.) Phones3.) Future events 4.) RAVEN
Especially for You race (EFY):AREDN will support the EFY race and we want to provide a proof of concept of the video across the network.
We have several things to get done before the race.1.) The OMNI antenna on the Mercy building is down and needs to be replaced. David to coordinate getting that done. Kraig has replacement hardware.
2.) We need to standardize and publish the frequencies for the route. Kraig to do this.
3.) We need to request the mobile tower and scout the race route for a location. The leading spot is the far side of McGrath on the road on the other side of the berm.
4.) We talked about selecting a VHF uniplex frequency for backchannel comms during the race.
5.) If Eric is going to be in the Mercy Comms room, we would ask him to re-program that phone for the PBX’s and there was talk about adding a person in there with him to handle the AREDN/back channel comms while he did net control.
6.) We are looking at using Kraig’s new python camera app as Blue Iris raised the license cost to $100. Kraig gave a demo of it. It currently lacks recording capabilities but creates a twitch feed for broadcasting.
7.) We are looking for a couple more people to help with AREDN for the EFY race. contact Kraig if interested.
Phones:
The two new Grandstream PBX’s have been stable and one is located at the EOC and the other on the Collins Tower. Greg W0GSK will send extension login information to those who had extensions on the old system. The extension numbers will be the same on all PBXs to simplify calling someone on whichever PBX is available. Currently Line 1 and the default system should be the one at the EMA with Collins on Line 2 and as backup. After that the EMA/CVARC Comms trailer and finally the CVARC trailer are 3 and 4. Those systems do not currently work because hardware needs to be added to the trailers.
If you want an extension contact Greg at gskuhlman@gmail.com and he can send you what you need and create an account on the system. Currently we are limiting accounts to people in Linn County
Future eventsThere was some discussion about the race next weekend and we traditionally do the reindeer run in early December.
RAVEN
Raven is a decentralized mesh messaging platform for AREDN with the ability to bridge messages from AREDN to other message platforms. Currently it interoperates with Meshtastic, MeshCore and Winlink.
Raven is a replacement for Meshchat and is installed on your node. It replicates messages between all connected nodes.
We talked about creating an AREDN channel within Raven and the connectivity to Meshtastic makes it potentially nice for real time backchannel during events.
https://github.com/kn6plv/
We are working to provide file storage and other capabilities on the AREDN network but our website can be found at https://www.eiedn.org/Currently Kraig was asking for some donations to cover the cost. Web hosting and domain name costs have increased from $75 for the year to $100. If you are able to assist anything to cover the cost, please reach out to Kraig asap as the renewal date is Oct 1th, 2026.