Another 70 cm radio: http://doodlelabs.com/products/sub-ghz-range/420-450-mhz-band-dl435.html

Oddly, these guys clearly state this radio is intended for Amateur Radio service, yet advertise 128 bit AES encryption "for over the air privacy".

Also oddly, they claim to only want to work with OEMs. Anyone know of a company making commercial ham nodes for 70 cm? Heh... want to start one?

Cheers;

Bob KV4PC

Using the "Slide-Band" mod on all equipment would make a heck of a difference.

The downside is, all other nodes that want to use that mesh need to have the mod done.

https://www.xagyl.com/store_ca/product.php?productid=16450&cat=327&page=1

Here is a 1 watt 70 cm radio WIFI card.

Folks:

Have a look at the Garmen GPS 18 OEM. The bare wire unit has 1PPS on a ttl line. Same cost range as the Byonics. A bit larger in a puck form factor, longer cable. Also, gpsd can serve GPS data over a network, though the only thing I can think of that would be useful away from the collection point is time or to track a mobile node. You can run an ntp server on a node too. Which is better done with a 1PPS signal to sync your NMEA data.

Cheers;

Bob KV4PC

Yes.

(Sorry, couldnt resist )

But not the way you describe.

We can run spread spectrum on 70cm @ 10 watts PEP.

In theory at least, we should be able to run White Space radios on 70 cm. I also hear that a Japanese company has sold a 70cm-specific 802.11 radio. If they are available in miniPCI or USB form, such a radio could easily be run in an OpenWRT node. Embeddable backplanes with miniPCI are very popular node hardware with the WISPs and certain ones will run OpenWRT distros. And lots of folks have hacked a USB onto a Linksys box.

A quick search found this:

http://www.carlsonwireless.com/products/ruralconnect-ip.html

and this:

http://www.wirelessinteractive.com/orion400/

These are complete commercial systems with an embedded router, antenna etc but at heart they have an Atheros card of some kind (someone will have parts to sell). These run above 460. But there are always hacks....

UPDATE:

This link is a fairly targeted and names names....

http://www.3dbwireless.com/boyd/?p=466

Cheers;

Bob KV4PC

Here is a little bash script that I use under Cygwin to ID the laptop:

fccid:

#!/usr/bin/bash

while true;

do

cat callsign.txt | nc -uw1 10.255.255.255 5555

sleep 300

done

Where callsign.txt is:

Callsign: KV4PC

In a bash shells I do:

$ ./fccid &

"&" to back ground it, and then close the shell. It runs to the next shutdown.

I probably ought to simply kick it off from my start up folder.

Cheers;

Bob KV4PC

No.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Seriously, there just isn't enough bandwidth available on 2M/440 to squeeze any serious throughput in. The 2.4 Ghz wifi channel is 20 Mhz wide, much wider than the 25 Khz available on the lower bands. If you rummage around the forums, you'll find some links to a couple of companies developing narrow band radios with decent throughputs, but 'decent' means slow dial-up. Better than 9600b packet, but you probably won't be doing video conferencing. I've worked with radios commercially that can reliably do 96k kb (kilo- bits, not bytes) in a 25 Khz channel, but they aren't cheap.

I've got a similar situation; I don't live around mountains, but I do live in a hole. I'd need an 80' tower to get a clear line of site anywhere. I'm pretty much stuck with mobile operations from my car. If you can get something up on a nearby mountaintop, however, you'll be surprised at the performance you can squeeze out of these little routers.

Good luck, and have fun.

I am new here and excited to get into this area of communications.

An idea struck me the other day. We live in an area of mountains with not a lot of line of site for connections. So I got to thinking is there any way to take the signal from the router and sending it through a cheap Chinese radio 2 meter or 440 radio to relay the signal to a router set up the same way. These radios are so cheap now that I wondered if anyone has tried to hack this together.

Thanks for any input.

Bill:

Im a big fan of Radio Mobile. It is awesome that such a good tool is essentially free to use.

Years ago I used OpenWRT/OLSR radios as an emulator/surrogate for the Harris HNR radio in a series of field demonstrations for a Defense contract, and I had a proprietary tool that used similar estimating algorithms (Longley-Rice at base, Fresnel Zone model, Foliage model, Fading model). It gave extremely good estimates of link behavior for "clear sunny day" conditions. We saw link margins that were probably within 3 or 4 dB of predicted in nearly every case. That is close enough to know when a link is going to work and when it is not.

The tool I had did only two more things than Radio Mobile - it had a precipitation model which was nice. But the biggie was that is it would generate kml files for coverage viewsheds that geo-registered semi-transparent JPEG images. You could then load the kml file into Google Earth and see the coverage viewsheds overlaid on the geometry, and look at them from "bird's eye view" on top of exaggerated 3D geography. Useful to really understand your coverage area.

The view sheds could be generated in different levels of Longley-Rice "reliability" or with precip so you could get a stack of coverages for different conditions. Or lay out repeater linkages like for trunk radio. Very valuable for Meshes.

73;

Bob KV4PC

Hello all. New to HSMM-mesh. Located in New Castle, DE (FM29ep) near Christiana, but mainly interested in utilizing HSMM-mesh in the field.

I currently have a solar-powered APRS weather station in Swedesboro, NJ http://goo.gl/maps/8rwbK and thinking of attempting a HSMM-mesh node for still imaging from this location. I am about to deploy another solar-powered APRS WX station in Bear, Delaware.

I currently have a Linksys WRT54GS V2.1 running HSMM-mesh, but no external antennas. Need to determine my application before deciding on an antenna design.

Feel free to PM or email me mycall @ arrl dot net if you like to discuss any ideas.

Best,
Brian

Try Radio Mobile to do your link and coverage assessment or to plan your deployment.

Radio Mobile: http://www.cplus.org/rmw/english1.html

You will have to either pay the fee to use 2412 MHz or be satisfied with 2305 MHz substitution, but it gives credible results and truly excellent depictions of terrain and Fresnel Zone profiles.

I use 4.74 uVolts for receiver sensitivity which corresponds to the threshold of most consumer WIFI APs running at about 1 Mbps. You should get a link margin at the end of an assessment report, and you want that link margin to be 20 or 30 dB for good broadband performance.

73;

Bob KV4PC