[FADCA] BBS and Ecomms

[fadca@mailman.qth.net]

I have sort of been watching this thread, and thought I would toss in my
two cents.
 
When I lived in Costa Rica we used to use AA4RE on both the source and
collection side of emergency operations. The idea was to reduce or eliminate
the need for trained operators to handle all of the radio/packet
idiosyncrasies.
 
What we did was set up AA4RE on portable computers, yes we were even
able to get it on a floppy and run it on laptops that had only floppy
drives.
 
One the sink side (the collecting BBS) we had emergency areas that captured
the data and then sent it on to it's destinarion.
 
One the source side, the devices that were out in the field were also AA4RE,
I am thinking back 13-14 years ago now so it is not all clear, but we set
the
portable devices up to check for pending messages ever 2 minutes, the
operator
just had to give the message a very basic address, and a title, then fill in
the
pertinent information, close the message and start a new one. From there on
the BBS part took over and pushed the message out to the collecting side.
 
After the Limon Earthquake in 1991, we were able to establish 100% trust in
the system. We would send operators into the triage areas and they would
send triage data back to the hospitals that were taking the victims so that
when they arrived there was a electronic trail of info already there on each
one. Same goes for all other emergency activities. AA4RE worked well in
this way as I seem to recall that there was a way to cause it to produce
a form on the screen as a message and we created those forms so that all
the operators had to do was add the destination address,. title and fill in
the blanks, send and start the next one.
 
The beauty was that since there was not direct interaction with the radio
(that was automatic) we met the letter of the law (in Costa Rica) and the
hams could go about doing radio stuff where their expertise was needed.
 
 


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