How are you today?

[JohnMusic]

CB is still around, just outside the 10 meter amateur radio band... Usually just rednecks these days and people running illegal transmitters (In excess of 1 kW)...

But to answer your question about using the internet to talk to people on the radio, yes, very much yes...

The two popular methods is D-STAR. I'm kind of new to D-STAR but you can via the internet can set to talk on a particular reflector, like reflector 77 apparently is the entire state of Tenessee. The D-STAR enabled repeaters have an internet backhaul, or a 10 GHz backhaul to another repeater. So either by through the repeater or the internet you can talk to anyone on that reflector in digital voice.... about the same audio quality as Narrow banded FM, but without any static... That's one of the things about digital voice you always have clear reception...then you get nothing...there's no "picket fencing" like you normally hear with FM.

The other method is Echo-Link which is more less an internet node. Folks can use the Echo-link program to talk into a repeater or otherwise through a echo-link node.

There are other means, there's packet radio, Win-Link, PSK31, etc...

Thank you.