About Hamshack Hotline
Hamshack Hotline (HH) is a FREE dedicated voip telecom service for the Ham Radio community. Typically, phones are established in hamshacks, EOCs, Clubs & club members, ARES, and other Ham related areas and functions. It is not the intention of HH to replace traffic carried over radio in an emergency or other tactical operation, but rather to augment it, by offloading managerial tactical operations and providing a full duplex path for such communications when spectrum is occupied, conditions diminished, or otherwise unavailable. HH also supports FAXing of information (with appropriate equipment) which allows tactical offices to share documents & data between tactical locations. In a non-tactical use, HH is an effective resource for off-air troubleshooting when you need to coordinate a troubleshoot of a radio circuit off-air and between multiple SMEs. In addition to all this, conference bridges on the HH network allow large groups of Hams to coordinate & meet in real time anywhere in the world.
This was one of the first things I did. I had two radios from my days with FireCorps, but was worried about missing etiquette.
So I saw a post on Tiktok about HamShack Hotline and decided that since we are a professional VoIP company, I could do that pretty easy, and on top of that it was FreePBX! The same system we run on!
It took me a bit of fiddling, and some help from Matt (From ClearlyIP), but I ended up getting a US Trunk connected to my FreePBX with very little Effort, and now I can do more than just make or receive phone calls. I can pipe my own audio files in, I can host my own IVR, I can also connect it to my own registered End Points. For example, HH seems to really like the Cisco series phones (Ostensibly due to cost), however for those of us who may already have phones, it’s a bit of a pain point to have to purchase phones when we already have phones to use. For example, I have Clearly IP Phones, and Clearly Anywhere SoftPhone, so it makes sense that instead of downloading another App to utilize this server, I would trunk it to my PBX and program it so that I can call out from my company extension and utilize the Hamshack Hotline Network. And that’s EXACTLY what I did!
Future projects that I want to do with this, is to learn how to stream my Waco PD Broadcastify Feed as an MOH AND add a rig at the office as an MOH.
Here’s the main website: HAMSHACK HOTLINE
Here’s the base tutorial I Used: kb:iax:trunk.info [Hamshack Hotline Wiki]
Please note that while this sort of worked, we did have to tweak it a little. I will be posting a more in-depth tutorial and videos at a later date of what I and Matt did to make it work as well as some of the fun things I did with my trunk.