Feasibility of an Amateur Radio Transmitter Implementation Using Raspberry Pi for a Low Cost and Portable Emergency Communications Device

The Philippines is a disaster-prone country which is visited by an average of 20 typhoons per year. Located along the Pacific ring of fire, natural calamities such as earthquakes and volcano eruptions also occur in the country. In times of calamity, cellular service could go down which makes the coordination with local government units and emergency response teams difficult. Moreover, majority of the population is heavily dependent on cellular phones making rescue operations more challenging when cellular systems go down. A need for a robust and reliable communication system arises during times of calamity in the country and amateur radio is an option. In this paper, we propose a low-cost and portable implementation of an amateur radio module based on Raspberry Pi (RPi) that can convert a message from a smartphone sent through Wi-Fi to an Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) broadcast that can be recognized by amateur radio equipment. We demonstrate the feasibility of the system by transmitting a message from an RPi and convert it to an APRS message that is received by a handheld amateur radio.