 Hello, as many of you know, I live in Florida and a few months ago we were hit by Hurricane Irma. And during that time our regular means of communication went down, internet, cell phones and the such. And even at the fire department, which I am a firefighter, the towers that we normally use for our radio communications went down. So we were unable to use our standard radios. We did have a few shortwave radios so we were still able to stay in touch by someone talking to somebody and then relaying it down, relaying it down. Thing is this talk takes communication and people writing stuff down, which is fine. But normally when we get dispatches we'll call under normal circumstances. We have computers in our truck which receive information of what address we're going to and why we're going there and just details like that. And I wondered, could I come up with something that did that through these shortwave radios? It's called CAD, computer aided dispatch. And so can we come up with a cheap form of CAD in these emergency situations? And I've played around with different things in the past and this is what I've come up with. Here I have a short two-way radio. This is my personal, this is not what we use at work, but really I just need anything that could send out and something to receive a signal. And so this through the normal headphone jack here is hooked to my computer here and it's going to the audio in on my computer. And on the other end I have another one of those radios hooked to an MP3 player. Now on this scenario I'm using my desktop and an MP3 player but this could be any two devices that have audio outputs. On the MP3 here I'm just doing this for portability. It has a pre-recorded digital tone message on it but it could be something like an Arduino or an onion computer, cheap computers that are under $30 or it could be a desktop. And this is going to be my transmitter. I'm going to drive down the street and send a signal that I've pre-recorded on this that we could also generate on the fly with a computer. And the other radio at the other end here is going to capture that and convert it to text and not only that but I'm going to have it, that text be displayed in an HTML output so it looks nice and this could be viewed on phones, tablets, computers. So let's go ahead and have a look at that. Let's give it a try. I'm going to drive down the street now. Obviously the information I have saved on this MP3 player is a list of addresses. I just googled list of addresses but it could be any information you want to send, what trucks are supposed to be going, why they're going, the address they're going to obviously. So there's a lot of information to send. Obviously the transfer rate is going to be rather low so you don't want to send too much information but you should be able to send the necessary information. And now instead of having someone write it down and maybe the address got wrong you can still transmit it audibly speaking to somebody but we can also send this data which is stored and displayed and can be referenced later on the systems that they're getting it from. Now I just need to get this baby up to 88 miles per hour but wait no that's next week's project. That's a bad joke. Anyway, so now all I have to do is start transmitting. We'll turn on the MP3 player because it's timed out. So I'm going to click to key up the radio and then press play on this but again this is just an MP3 player but it could be a computer as well. So keying up, pressing play and just letting the audio play for a while. There's a long list of addresses on there. At the current rate that I'm transmitting at it's going to transmit it's going to be about two and a half to three minutes to transmit the entire list that I have but you can up the speed but you also take a chance of losing some data if you up it too much. So we're transmitting this the hardest part is holding down this button the entire time I'm transmitting my thumb gets kind of tired but why don't we go while I'm transmitting this and switch to the other camera and see what is being transmitted and coming across the screen of the computer. So as you can see the addresses are coming across in a list format easy to read and of course you can change the output of that because it's just playing text that's being transmitted each new piece of information on a new line in this case and I'm taking each line and putting into a new item in the list and it's regularly updating every three seconds on that computer of course you can increase that time if you need. So that's just a quick display of what we're working on. So in the next couple of videos I'm going to go over the details on how this works I'm going to show you the code I'm going to show you different options and why I chose the option that I chose and how simple it is to transmit information all you need is a nice clear signal if there's a lot of interference you're going to start missing some characters so in this particular case I'm sending plain text and in some cases you know at parts if you miss a character to it's not a big deal we're not transmitting anything binary images or programs themselves so it's not going to completely screw up the entire project if the character is lost it might be a little important if it's an address and you're missing a numeric in there but the system isn't going to crash if a character if there's some loss in transmission so you might miss get some gargled messages but the information will get through and the process is going to completely die if it doesn't so I thank you for watching please check out the follow-up videos on this they'll be releasing over the next couple of days there should be a link to a playlist in the description of this video and I do hope you enjoy them hope you learn a lot and hope this is useful to you thank you for watching please visit filmsbychrist.com that's Chris of the K there's a link in the description as always I hope that you have a great day