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Ham Radio licenses are a much tighter correlation. About 10% across all countries and cultures.

It's good to see people doing stuff, but this article is a decade or two out of date.

Hams have been hooking computers to radios for a long, long time.

There are hundreds of pages on digital radio and sound card interfacing:
  try
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSK31
http://hfradio.org.uk/html/digital_modes.html
http://www.tapr.org/packetradio.html
http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Technical_Reference/Sound_Card_Radio_Interfacing/

But can a community of individuals really launch satellites, or maintain an under-sea cable that goes from Los Angeles to Tokyo?

The HAM community can.

You'd be surprised how many people are "closet hams"--I just got my license this summer and when I mention it in conversation I am frequently surprised when my acquaintance fires back with their own call sign. You probably know a few people who have licenses or were licensed in the past, even if they never talk about it. Granted, only a fraction of licensees maintain functional HF stations, but they all know the technology exists and where to find it.

There are 694,429 licensed hams in the U.S., 2.26% of the population of 307 million, and that percentage has been steady over the last decade of population growth. Worldwide, there are 2.77 million licensees, or 0.04% of the world population of 6.7 billion, but ham radio is getting very popular in developing nations like China and Indonesia and not every operator has a license.

A collection of links on antenna arrays at a ham radio antenna design site: http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Antennas/Array/

It's not all about signal strength. Sensitivity these days is rarely an issue; the electronics in the receiver are excellent. Of greater relevance are polarization, rejection of off-axis noise, directivity, and the ability to reject signals from adjacent bands. There are also issues of setup difficulty, and this is what the primary focus of the design in question is.

Aiming a dish antenna is a chore, and high winds which shake a parabolic dish can cause signal strength to fluctuate dramatically. An electronically controlled phased array can, by introducing delays to various antenna elements, "steer" itself and lock onto a satellite with great accuracy (within a few degrees of the direction the array is aimed). A small antenna, perfectly aimed, will outperform a larger antenna poorly aimed, and if the antenna's controller can aim itself without physical adjustments many thousands of times per second, wind and a... coarse job of aiming the antenna are non-factors.

A military example: PAVE-PAWS, a 435Mhz missile detection array used by the US Air Force. The antennas in question are made of thousands of smaller elements (a single dipole element at 435MHz is about 35cm long), do not move, but the transmitted radar beam and the reception-aiming can be extremely precise. The more elements you have, the narrower the beam but the higher the gain.

L-band, commonly used by companies like satellite TV providers, is 1 to 2 GHz. An array of 16 log-periodic (wideband) antenna elements would therefore be 60cm square. A 4-element array would be 30cm square. Pretty compact, and if it gets rid of the most common cause of poor signal strength (a poorly-aimed dish), it's a win.

RF propagation beacon is a station that transmits a carrier (sometimes modulated) that is used to monitor propagation all over the world.

http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/DX_Resources/Beacons/

You can make a microwave signal go light years and a HAM signal go a few feet

Just for clarification, ham radio operators operate in the microwave region as well. They perform EME (earth-moon-earth) using microwave radios with regularity.

Some info here: http://www.dxzone.com/catalog/Operating_Modes/EME/

Steam games

Okay, games are a weakness for Macs though there are a lot that run on them. What I find ironic is that I run into people who think Macs are only good for games.

Decent Amateur radio software and no, the software listed on http://www.machamradio.com/ is not good enough.

What about the DXZone? Things may of changed since then but years ago I knew hams who swore by Macs. I wanted to get my license myself but I had a hard tyme with Morse Code.

x11 that supports drag and drop properly, so I can use x11 applications as they should be used.

I've tried two X11 apps, CinePaint and Fink or MacPorts but I couldn't get either one to work. I may install Ubuntu on my Mac, in which case I can run CinePaint in it and use Synaptic as well as other methods to install software.

Have you checked out CNR, ClickNRun?

Stuff like fink, macports which isn't hopelessly broken

Did you try both at the same tyme? I read where you should use one OR the other as they don't play well together.

Falcon

If you've got line-of-sight between the two locations (or can acheive line-of-sight by mounting antennas on a mast), there's no reason why a couple of off-the-shelf 802.11 APs couldn't be adapted to provide connectivity. What you will need is a yagi (directional) antenna on each end of the connection, to direct your signal towards the other location while deafening the transceiver to other interfering signals. Yagis aren't cheap to buy off the shelf, but homebrew yagis can be made at a fairly reasonable price with parts from your neighborhood Radio Shack. Relevant info here.

You may only achieve 1-2Mbps rates, but it would be better than dial-up and satellite, and won't require the use of a phone line.

The SARA, ARRL or DX zone. You've probably done the google search for "amateur radio telescope"
Given that you have the hardware it would seem you need to find someone who has the skills to design the thing. My guess is that your local ham or astrology club would have people who have the knowledge and desire to help. Do you have a university close by, prehaps they might want to take it on as a grad project. But my first port of call would be SARA.
IMHO this is the sort of question that /. should post, I doubt there will be many posts but who cares. I want thought provoking or interesting questions. In short I want questions that make me go and hunt down some ideas.

Getting widespread computing resources and connectivity into remote regions of the world can be a tall order. You have very difficult economic, cultural, and technological hurdles to overcome - expect this to be a major project. Its not clear to me what kind of solution you need ... some key questions to consider:

• What kind of budget do you have?
  
• Do you really need to connect 1200 sites with many out in the bush? Simultaneously? How many users/bandwidth per site?
  
• Do you require high bandwidth?
  
• What kind of link uptime requirements?
  
• Do the bush sites even have reliable power and existing computing resources?
  

There are a wide variety of potential solutions, and a lot of the choices are going to depend on the answers to these questions. Its quite possible to get satellite links with high bandwidth and independent providers to the remote sites, but that costs very big bucks. Even satellite telephones are prohibitively expensive outside of mineral exploration and a few other uses. If all you need is basic email interoperability then a ham packet radio network would seem to make more sense.

I suspect your best bet is to figure out the general class of solution you might be looking for (very likely ham radio based, as there is already some infrastructure in africa for that and expertise among the relief organizations) and try to work with vendors, other experts, and local contacts with that solution in mind.

I would think as a relief organization you could get uplink cooperation from governmental/military providers, but you don't mention the organization so perhaps local cooperation is not forthcoming. The ISP email problem is probably best solved by using them as an IP provider only and setting up your own email server (get a cheap donated box and use it for general management as well as your own smtp server).

Of course a google search brings up some interesting info, which I hope you've already worked through.

Regards, RJS