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