In parts of the United States where there is not always a robust communications network, repeaters are especially important for emergency response. Oklahoma’s five-county area, in the south, lost theirs recently to a “controlled burn” held routinely on ranch land except….it got out of control. (Sadly they had no insurance).

Fire has destroyed the W5BLW repeater in southern Oklahoma, taking down a critically important resource for SKYWARN, the Red Cross and local emergency operations in five counties of the region. According to Vance Smith, KE5BAL, of the Ardmore Amateur Radio Club, it will be a slow road back for the repeater, which stood for more than 16 years.

Vance stated repeater was consumed by a controlled burn that went the wrong way on the private ranch property where the repeater stood. By the time the damage was noticed on the mountaintop, it was too late.

ARDC grant will fund development, documentation, and promotion of this important open-source amateur radio technology.

To advance the state of the art in HF digital voice and to promote its use, Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) has awarded $420,000 to the FreeDV Project. With this grant, the FreeDV Project team will:

• Hire experienced digital signal processing developers to work with the volunteer staff to improve speech quality and improve low signal-to-noise ratio operation, making FreeDV performance superior to single-sideband (SSB) over poor high-frequency (HF) channels.