March 2015 Club Meeting Speaker

The National Traffic System (NTS) has been relaying short text messages, called radiograms, throughout the US and Canada since the 1940s. We have recently been undergoing some major changes. In addition to the “traditional” traffic nets, we now also have some modern tools, including automatic digital message forwarding on Pactor (NTSD) & radio email via WinLink2000 (WL2K). We don’t have much “third party greeting” traffic any more in the age of cell phones, but we do have plenty of ham-to-ham traffic. NTS may be very useful someday for tactical and welfare traffic, when “all else fails.” In the meantime, it serves to train operators to pass information accurately & efficiently by radio, using voice, CW and digital modes, and to operate in a complex directed net environment. We are the only group that I know of that practices for disasters 365.25 days per year. Traffic handling is also a lot of fun!