Join us for our July 20th club meeting. 6-7pm is social hour. 7-7:30pm is meeting. This month’s presentation will be on the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) by Orv Beach W6BI. This presentation will be available to watch LIVE via this Zoom Link.
The AREDN™ Project’s focus is Emergency Communications (EmComm). It seeks to provide hams a means to implement this technology in practical ways to support local and regional emergency communications needs. To that end, the project’s objectives are to enable hams to:
• Stand up a working mesh node with minimal expertise and effort
• Configure the mesh network automatically so that advanced network knowledge is not needed
• Use low-cost, reliable commercial equipment
• Define standards for inter- network integration
• Support those in the process of designing and implementing EmComm networks
• Refine the software to make implementation easier, more reliable, and more manageable
Orv W6BI lives in Simi Valley, California. He’s a retired Linux system administrator, an ARRL Santa Barbara Section Technical Specialist and an AREDN Ambassador.
He was first licensed as WN6WEY in 1967. He’s been into digital ham radio all his life, starting with CW. He worked his way up through RTTY, PACTOR, packet radio and PSK31, and started messing around with ham radio networking in 2014. He helped deploy the initial network network nodes and backbone buildout in Ventura County and western Los Angeles County. He currently administers several dozen of them.
He’s also active in coordinating the build-out and maintenance of the wider Southern California ham radio network, which now spans from Paso Robles in central California south to the Mexican border and east to Las Vegas, comprising over 450 nodes, both hilltop and ground-level, including hospitals, police departments and EOCs.
As an AREDN Ambassador he’s given MANY presentations about ham radio networking using AREDN software over the years and Elmered many hams worldwide on ham radio networking. He’s active in AREDN groups in Facebook, Slack, Telegram, and Discord, and monitors the forums on the AREDN website.