Hams over IP — DeKalb ARES extension

What Hams Over IP is

Hams Over IP (HoIP) is a free VoIP phone service for licensed amateur radio operators, run by a nonprofit and built on the open-source Asterisk PBX. It’s “bring your own device” — operators register, get SIP credentials, and configure them into a softphone (Linphone on a laptop or phone), a hardware SIP phone (Cisco SPA-series, Grandstream, Yealink), or an ATA box that plugs an old-fashioned analog phone into the network.

Once registered, every operator gets an extension reachable from every other extension on the network. Clubs and ARES groups typically register their own extensions so members can dial the group directly without needing to know individual operator numbers.

Hams Over IP also has trunk links to other amateur-radio VoIP networks, so a HoIP extension can dial into AmateurWire (prefix the AmateurWire extension with 910), Hamshack Hotline, and other related systems without each operator needing accounts on each. (As of 2025, HoIP also invited Hamshack Hotline users to migrate accounts in a partial consolidation of the two networks.)

What DeKalb ARES did

Nathan Smith (NF4L) walked the group through HoIP at the January meeting and worked on registering a dedicated DeKalb ARES extension so members can reach the group through the HoIP network the same way they’d dial any other club extension. That extension is intended for member coordination and informal traffic outside the weekly net cycle — a low-overhead option for “I need to ask another member something” that doesn’t require getting on the air.

Where Hams Over IP fits in the broader VoIP landscape

Amateur radio has accumulated a meaningful number of voice-over-IP systems over the past two decades. They aren’t all the same thing:

System	What it actually does
EchoLink	Bridges a remote computer/phone client into a participating RF repeater over the internet — lets you talk on someone else’s repeater from far away
AllStarLink	Open-source linking of RF repeater nodes via internet, plus computer/phone clients — similar in spirit to EchoLink, more flexible architecture
DMR networks (BrandMeister, TGIF, DMR-MARC)	Digital-mode talkgroup linking — DMR radios on RF repeaters connect via internet to talkgroups others can listen to from anywhere on the network
D-STAR / YSF / NXDN reflectors	Equivalent talkgroup-style linking for the other digital voice modes
Hamshack Hotline	VoIP phone service for hams — directly comparable to Hams Over IP, predates it
Hams Over IP	VoIP phone service for hams — Asterisk-based, free, BYOD; trunks to Hamshack Hotline, AmateurWire, others
AmateurWire	Another VoIP phone service, with a slightly different membership profile and dial-plan

The first four bridge RF radios to the internet. Hams Over IP and its peers (Hamshack Hotline, AmateurWire) bridge phones and softphones to a private SIP network shared only by hams — they’re not radio gateways, they’re a private dial-tone network for the ham community.

Connection to AREDN mesh

This is where Hams Over IP gets operationally interesting for an ARES group.

AREDN (Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network) is not a VoIP service. It’s a mesh radio network built on repurposed Wi-Fi hardware operating on amateur frequencies, carrying standard IP traffic between nodes — the same TCP/IP that runs over a wired ethernet, but transported across an all-radio mesh. Among the things you can run over an AREDN mesh: a local Asterisk PBX, with member SIP phones registered to it.

That’s exactly the architecture Hams Over IP uses on the public internet — only over AREDN it works without the internet and without commercial cell or fiber. The AREDN community publishes a prebuilt configuration package called MeshPhone: a set of skeleton Asterisk configs that bring up “ham radio flavor” extensions on a Raspberry Pi PBX hosted on a mesh node.

The practical implication for an ARES group:

• Day-to-day, peacetime: members dial each other on Hams Over IP over normal internet
• In an emergency, with internet down: the same SIP phones can re-register to a local AREDN-hosted PBX on the mesh, and the same members can keep talking on the same phones — with no dependency on any commercial carrier

That continuity — same hardware, same dialing, same numbers, just a different transport when the wider internet is unavailable — is the real reason ARES groups invest time in registering on systems like Hams Over IP. The skill stays current, the equipment stays familiar, and the failover when it matters is short.

Where to learn more

• hamsoverip.com — the service itself
• Hams Over IP Wiki — Getting Started
• AREDN — New to VoIP
• AREDN — MeshPhone