Email Over Radio Project

[VA3KOT John]

Dave, I agree with the principles you laid down in your last message but I am a nuts-and-bolts, feet-on-the-ground kind of person and when I read https://emncc.ca/ my first thought was that RAC's bureaucracy was being merged into a bigger, multi-party bureaucracy. The website sounds like a corporate mission statement. During my corporate career I had to work with people who would agonize for months over the most powerful wording for the corporate mission statement. Meanwhile, I was working to a P&L quota and could be fired for failing to "meet my numbers". I expect EMNCC will tie itself in knots for years organizing focus groups, stakeholder consultations and environmental reviews before ever doing anything that would be useful in a real emergency. Sorry to sound negative but I spent years wading through all that nonsense.

It would be useful to have an emergency communications system that is standard across Canada but Winlink isn't it. Take a look at the map of RMS channels at: https://winlink.org/RMSChannels. There are none in our area. The closest ones belong to Ian Snow in Barrie. I know Ian; he is a good ham and a dedicated and active ARES volunteer, but we need an Ian Snow in every city in Canada to make it work. It would take years to build an infrastructure of RMS gateways across the country. Some whole provinces have none at all! And then we would have to settle on a technology. Should it be 50 year-old AX.25 with it's 1200 baud limitation; or should it be one of the newer, faster and more efficient modes?

Winlink is a project for licensed hams; other EMNCC agencies won't be able to use it so there won't be a standard across the board. The best we could hope for would be using a common set of forms exchanged over multiple systems.

I posted a thread on these forums several months ago entitled "ARES is dead, let's bury it". It seems RAC is headed in that direction but I am not sure that what replaces ARES will be an improvement. We need lots of hams who are ready, willing and able to get on the air with whatever works right now. If somebody has a practical plan for how to do that with Winlink I am all ears.