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All,
A few years ago, before he got busy with his law enforcement career and having kids, I recall Matthew Murphy (KF5NRU) giving a short talk at a Club meeting. He wanted to do some testing from various places in the area and see if we might successfully map out a simplex network. That is how I recall it anyway. I remember thinking he basically wanted to replicate the “relay” portion of the genesis of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL). In those days they relayed messages out of necessity. We might find ourselves in a “necessity” situation like that, see the 7920 Net (link here) and our recent ongoing forum discussions reference LoRa in general and Meshtastic specifically (link here).
Jerry Keisler (WA5KZA) wrote me overnight, asking me if I had seen a article in the July 2026 QST titled Establishing a County-Wide Simplex Emergency Network (link here)? I had not and so I went and looked it up. The headline alone reminded me of Murphy’s mention a few years ago, so I went ahead and dug in. From the article:
- A Florida club built a network of 21 VarAC stations.
- The group had three analog and two digital repeaters, and those repeater antennas are vulnerable to hurricane-force winds.
- They sought to create a system to pass emergency traffic across the entire county, logging messages that don’t rely on the power grid, the internet, antennas, or repeaters.
- They initially evaluated five different systems to meet their goals: FM simplex, near vertical incidence skywave, digital mobile radio simplex, Automatic Packet Reporting System and Meshtastic.
The article then mostly goes into great detail about how they demonstrated the VarAC setup, which involves a laptop and radio, think Winlink as this is similar.
It isn’t Murphy’s idea as I understood it, and it didn’t go the Meshtastic route, but it is yet another way of solving the same problem that we have all realized; there needs to be some additional redundancy to the way things are. This solution involves VHF and HF both, which is fine, but that necessitates a licensed operator. As I understand it. And the cost is higher. That’s my initial impression anyway.
There are lots of ways to address the shortcomings we all recognize and this is another one of them. I’ll be curious to see if anyone has any feedback. And I still think Murphy’s idea of a relay assessment and plan development would be appropriate. 😎👍🏼
73
Phillip Beall (W5EBC)
All,
Club Godfather Jerry Keisler (WA5KZA) followed up to me with an email and raw data table. I took that and produced the detail below.
ARES 2-Meter Simplex Test Results – November 15, 2021
We ran a practical simplex test — here are the visual results!
Key Takeaways:
Higher antennas + ~50W = strong full-quieting signals for most.
Low power struggled more.
Even mobile/low setups did surprisingly well.
Full data attached as spreadsheet (link here).I am thinking we repeat this at some point and use Meshtastic in the next round. What do you think?
73
Phillip Beall (W5EBC)
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