[liberationtech] Can HAM radio be used for communication between health workers in rural areas with no cell connectivity?

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 03/07/2013 07:31 PM, Sky (Jim Schuyler) wrote:

Nice, Erich.

In a sense, radio waves are the -ultimate- in liberation, crossing national boundaries in (single or multiple) bounds.

That may be a subrosa reason governments fight so hard to control them. That is clearly why some shortwave broadcasts are jammed. t's why the amateur service was cut off during WWII. That's also my conclusion about why amateurs are not allowed to use codes and ciphers (speaking of US here). Jim and all, As to krypto. Well, these are historic reasons. BUT: We are licensed to use _any_ digital protocol, as long as we open the "protocol" and the "compression" algorithm. So we may broadcast signalsd Whats on now, here? Yesterday the Vienna hacker space Metalab was crowded with dozens of haXors and a few older ham radio _geeks_. One of the latter held a lecture on some basics of amateur radio. Everybody of those listening will do their all bands 100 Watt exams, that allows them operating from around 40 CEPT countries without notice for three months. USA included. 50 other Metalab haXors already have their diploma. All between 20 and 35. Next came OE1DNS [early thirties, licence three years ago] and had a screenshow on extraterrestrial broadcasting. satellites, moon bouncing and so on. OE4DNS and OE1RFC [note the callsign suffices pse] wert the digital operators. OE1HWS coordinated that all. This dear OM is twice the age of the others. At the CCC Camp in 2011 the first ham haXor group ever here mounted an enormous home brew double yagi on an old water pipe that had rested on the "graveyard of undead antennas and masts" in my garden for years. Add a rotor and a Volkswagen bus containing a transceiver plus a 1,5 KW power amp. Thus the Metalab OPs hit the moon on 144 MHz using the "officially allowed amp out" & a digital protocol named WSJT by K1JT - - a nobel prize winner - for space comms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor,_Jr. These signals from CCC Camp broadcast from a former Soviet Air Base were successfully "restaurated". WSJT sports AFAIR eight different sorts of error correction. And many amateurs are so blasted conservative politically, but I don't know why that is! Can help here. Estimated 30-40+ [my estimate] percent of US ham ops are military or deeply entwined via military contractors. Some of them handle that pretty openly on qrz.com. This is the most influential ham social network. Russian OPs, next biggest group on the air. Incredibly strong signals. Military PAs. Half a dozen stations in my logfiles [I dont run many QSOs] from 2010 oan have been located less than 20 km away from November Sierra Alpha premises in Maryland. Ten times more related in West Virginia. This is experimentation, and tinkering, and hacking, and potentially liberation, but in the electronics sphere. +1 An hour ago I was discussing the use of a mini vertical network analyzer [400 USD Java prog running on Linux too] via OE1XUU vhf repeater here with other hams/haX0rs . All of us round 50 Km were talking to each other using less than 5 Watts either in Handsets or @ stations in QTH . All those on this list licensend might come in to talk to us @ the NightOWLS QSO starting from 23 hours UTC. You only need an echolink capable amateur radio repeater somewhere near to you and a 5 Watt handset sporting numeric inputs. Thus you can set up full scale _conference call_ between - say - San Francisco and Vienna in a minute. The ham radio echolink voice repeaters are linked via the net. There is a ton of potential that should not be ignored. Right. I could hold lecture on how to refurbish an antique 6 meter CB aluminium monster to play on 5 shortwave bands [20 to meters to ten] without much tuning in the shack using a matchbox [antenna tuner]. 500 Watts are realistic now using junkyard hardware. Made it into New Zealand where I could not reach despite my mighty longwire "fixed beam" . There is a visible gap in the diagram partially filled by the vertical. By WE I should have completed my 2nd 42 meter non moveable beam to another directon namely SSW straight. 73 de Erich OE3EMB

Much as an interest in sci-fi may lead to certain kinds of mindsets, experimentation and curiosity, an interest in amateur radio is frequently correlated with an interest in other people, other cultures, science, engineering, electronics, software and other skills that can be immensely valuable to our efforts.

There are certainly lots more folks on the list who have licenses, and there are lots of amateur operators who aid liberation technologies without advertising it.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ CyberSpark.net -Keeping the flame of free speech and human rights alive online

On Mar 7, 2013, at 9:50 AM, "Erich M." wrote:

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On 03/07/2013 09:26 AM, Griffin Boyce wrote:

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How far is the distance being covered, and in what kind of terrain (flat plains, hills)? HAM might not even be necessary if it's fairly close (relatively speaking). GMRS radios can cover several miles. Other small/cheap handhelds can cover a couple of miles in ideal conditions.

Think I can add a few bits of info here. Of course are these analog walkie talkies an absolute no go if you have to relay sensible information.

But ham operators _can_ help with their skills and Know-how. Here in AT our ham radio club - my callsign is OE3EMB - operates a nationwide wireless broadband backbone ring using TCP/IP. The ring is connected to the German HAMnet, the network reaches from Southern Italy to Scandinavia already. Self built self owned.

This is in German but there is an infrastucture graph http://wiki.oevsv.at/index.php?title=Kategorie:Digitaler_Backbone

This is English showing the German HAMnet in 2009

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http://kb9mwr.blogspot.co.at/2009/12/german-hsmm-hamnet-20.html

Essential is the availability of electrical power, of course. If that is a tribal areal area I have some doubts.

Components are off the shelf outdoor WiFI routers. The backbone operates in the 5 GHz WiFi band with directed antennas. At 5 GHz a much higher power output ist allowed than on 2,4 GHz which is used to distribute locally. All in all the whole network consumes rather little power, one unit or node - WiFi-Router and two planar directional antennas - is around USD 200 or less.

The antennas MUST look into "each others eye" that is another difficulty. But if so you can bridge 20 kilometers safely using 4-7 stations, depending on terrain, offering 50 Mbit/sec - conservative calculation.

- The net works like the internet, whether connected to the internet at some single node, or without that.

- There is neither a problem with encryption nor with licenses. This part of the frequency spectrum is open. Everbody can use it for wireless broadband purposes. my two Groschen and 73s de Erich OE3EMB

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