Commercial dispatch consoles start in the tens of thousands. So I built one for amateur radio.

The towers weren't coming with us

When I moved from west‑central Iowa to Illinois to take a job as a flight paramedic, the two towers at the old QTH — a hundred‑footer and a sixty‑footer — were not making the trip. That was made clear.

The compromise was this: instead of rebuilding a large VHF/UHF tower setup at the new place, I'd build a dispatch console and put remote radio nodes around the area to get the coverage I wanted.

Then I priced commercial dispatch consoles. Telex, Zetron — systems built for public safety, priced for public safety budgets. Nothing in that world is built for amateur radio, and nothing in it is affordable to an individual operator.

So I spent the past year building my own. Remote radio gateways, deep integrations for DMR, D‑STAR, Fusion, EchoLink and AllStarLink, and a console that monitors multiple talkgroups, conferences, repeaters and networks at the same time — all from one screen. It runs my own stations every day.