Sorry for the late reply - been off grid for a bit. I'm one of the hams at HacDC. I've been following the discussion of alternative radio systems to increase range and think there are interesting projects outside the scope of Byzantium - overlaying Byzantium on a different radio system or bridging disparate Byzantium clouds with a different radio system. I'm not sure that GSM is a good direction as it depends on cell providers infrastructure. There's a bunch of new high speed radio modem technology beyond GSM technology and most modem processing can be done with a PC or cell phone, etc. Using SDR just for the radio part might be a way to go. There are cheap Chinese ham radios out there, so that might be a cheaper route depending what frequency is used. As discussed the lower the frequency the better the range and penetration but smaller bandwidth and data-rate. The HF ham bands are orientated around 3 KHz SSB or 7KHz AM channels that are typically operated up to 1,200 BPS though with sufficient signal/noise ratio it's possible to achieve much higher data rates. I think VHF might be the sweet spot if you go ham. With the right antenna and enough power VHF will propagate much further than WiFi in any setting. The VHF ham bands have 25 KHz bandwidth FM channels with higher data rates possible over HF (typically 9,600 bps - more is possible). There are 50W mobile units for ~$200. I got mine used for $75. Beyond ham there is the 900 MHz/1 watt max power ISM band . This is probably too expensive a route but doesn't require a license and would still outperform WiFi. New radio technology can push the legal limits of FCC regulations. It is possible to get either an experimental license or waiver or even rules change from the FCC. Some of the FRS regs (95.193.b.2) were changed as the result of Garmin lobbying to allow for text/position locating features for their products, for example. There's also a push for self-regulation of amateur radio within the FCC allocations. FWIW the ham community has developed ax.25 packet bbs over radio systems for decades. There's probably some good ideas out there. The Montgomery County ARC mesh experimenters have been running HSMM-Mesh in the UHF ham band using these radios: http://doodlelabs.com/products/sub-ghz-range/420-450-mhz-band-dl435.html My $0.02. Martin KB3UJQ On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 1:40 PM, The Doctor <drwho@virtadpt.net> wrote:

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On 01/29/2013 01:22 PM, catskillmarina@gmail.com wrote:

...

It's a nice BBS though it could use a bit of work with regards to buffer overflows. I spent a lot of time reading the code. I suppose if someone were to put it up on some sort of repo we could really vent the code.

https://github.com/virtadpt/eBBS

https://github.com/virtadpt/ebbs-modules

- -- The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS|Media] Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/

PGP: 0x807B17C1 / 7960 1CDC 85C9 0B63 8D9F DD89 3BD8 FF2B 807B 17C1 WWW: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/

...and that is how we know the Earth is banana-shaped.

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