Post TU Comms and Networking

[River Song]

I’ve been giving some serious thought lately about communications post-TU.
Much of the conversations that have taken place are essentially with regard to short-distance work e.g. with things like UV5R’s etc. The focus on longer range stuff tends to revolve around Ham radios etc.

In his article on the main pages, SD mentioned FSK31 and an earlier thread on the forum mentioned apps for this. FSK31 over ham radio CAN traverse long distances.
Useful short range experiments can be undertaken by using the apps on your smart-phone to transmit FSK31 over your UV5R and translate it back again. As I say useful experiment but what exactly does it buy you? Simply text messaging over radio. My first experiments show that the apps are susceptible to background noise.

In an earlier post , (I can’t remember where exactly), I mentioned the possibility of packet-radio or AX.25 protocols which would enable you to network computers over radio circuits. Still very slow but a step forward to rebuild some form of post-TU networking. The problem with this is that as far as I can see, no-one has done much work on packet-radio/AX.25 for around 10 years or more.

I’ve since moved my own experiments forward a little more to look at mesh-networking with small modules each with their own WIFI, but connecting automagically to each other to make a bigger network called eg MESH1 in your village and then connecting to other MESH’s elsewhere. This would give you the advantage of having not only a comms network, but a rudimentary data network.

So far I’ve managed to get one mesh up and running . If anyone else is interested in these ideas, let me know here.

Allons-y

[Lightspeed]

Interesting project RS

There is high level of ownership of Wi-fi in the community. After mobile phones it must be the next most prevalent transceiver systems out there.

Could you explain how to set a MESH1 system up please?

[River Song]

[NorthernRaider]

Fabulous post darlink, don't understand a word of it but its fabulous, I bet LS understands though

[Lightspeed]

[Jonas]

[Straight Shooter]

Not got a bloody clue....way over my head .....does two baked bean tins and a piece of string count? .....but I have a CB though..and some walkie talkies ....that's about my dap .

[River Song]

LS < RS

You said.

So the idea is to create a peer to peer local network. Will the system you are considering pass messages on from one network user to another, until it reaches its correct destination? Kind of e-mail without internet???

Kind of.
If you picture the following.
Three houses side by side. Each house has a laptop running the software over its own wifi.
The three units would 'see' each other and would form a 'mesh'.

Even if only one of the units had internet access, users who accessed ANY of the units would have access to the internet.

So far so good.

Now consider no internet. All you have are the three units. However although there are (at present) no email facilities, there is an IRC chat and common notepad-like and if you create a document it is shared

I want to see this extended over wide areas and the 'next step' is to try and link these 'meshes' together in some way. (That's phase 2).

At present my task today is to try and get this up and running on a Raspberry Pi so that its a kind of blackbox that could be handed to NR and SS and say 'run with is'.

It cannot at present make coffee or shoot socialists !!

[NorthernRaider]

Thanks honey bun but I don't need one, my comms needs now only cover a 12 mile radius.

[Skean Dhude]

NR, If it words at a decent speed I'm sure you will be able to find some benefits. I've some ideas now myself.

RS, How do you lock areas down so they are secure or do you rely on document encryption?