The HamShield supports a wide range of VHF and UHF frequencies, covering 3 amateur bands. This includes the 1.25 meter or "220" band (220 MHz to 225 MHz), which is notoriously hard to find equipment for! It also can transmit on MARS bands.
Getting your Ham license is easy too! All that is required is a Technician license: http://www.arrl.org/getting-your-technician-license
The HamShield supports both voice and packet radio modes. You could even invent your own digital modes with enough skill. It is compact, lightweight, and works great with any Arduino or Arduino compatible that supports Uno-style shields.
The HamShield is the product of 12 months of design, engineering, and prototyping. This May 2015, we had our final design. We need your support to bring the economies of scale in our favor, fund the final development, part purchasing, and production of our shield, and help bring innovation back to Ham Radio.
With the HamShield, you no longer need a dedicated radio or piece of equipment for each type of operating mode. There is also no need for complicated radio interface cables. The radio is now under your complete control!
Practically no experience is needed to use the HamShield. Unlike other complicated, software defined radio boards, the transceiver core is a proven, commercial grade radio transceiver. There are a growing number of ready-to-use Arduino sketches we are actively developing. They are all ready to be uploaded to your Arduino!
As the community writes more Arduino sketches, this radio toolbox will grow. What will you write?
But the HamShield is even more powerful than just being the utility army knife of existing radio transceiver technology. The HamShield will bring true innovation back to Ham Radio, and yield new concepts and technologies.
Have you ever thought of a new, really cool, dream technology for amateur radio, but simply did not have the time, money or skill to take it to completion? Now, you can write a new program and bring it to life within minutes! We can't wait to see what people invent next with this shield!
The HamShield Transceiver
Final HamShield revision
The HamShield is powered by the Auctus 1846S radio transceiver IC, which features a fully integrated FM radio transceiver. This amazing chip, with a software defined radio core, allows the ability to offer a wide range of features such as sub-audio CTCSS/CDCSS modes, DTMF encoding and decoding, tail noise elimination, RSSI, squelch, VOX, volumes, and even a very powerful tone encoder and decoder (which may be fast enough for some digital modes if you are creative enough!) Both 12.5KHz or 25KHz FM channel bandwidth can be selected. You can also leverage the powerful ADC and filtered PWM output circuitry for digital and audio modes right from your Arduino sketches! There is also no complex software defined radio processing required.
