Email Over High-Frequency Radio in West Africa

Guillaume Filion writes "LinuxJournal has a fascinating article about Radio Email in West Africa over HF links. 'Deep inside the warm green interior of Guinea, centered in the frontal lobe of West Africa, field personnel in the widely scattered village-towns of Dabola, Kissidougou and Nzerekore now enjoy access to regular internet e-mail, directly from their desktops. Here we have bridged the digital divide, and there isn't a telephone line or satellite dish in sight.' Talk about Wireless Fidelity!"

Comments

Reminds me of Packet Radio

[ackthpt]

Amature radio buffs were into packet radio years ago, I don't know if it's still alive, but some I knew were sending the usual* chit-chat over 2M.

* "Hi", "How's the weather at your house", "Are you going to Dayton?", "Can I ride with you?"

Re:Reminds me of Packet Radio

[HeelToe]

This isn't quite HAM packet radio. Packet radio on HAM frequencies disallows gatewaying content to/from the internet at large.

Re:Reminds me of Packet Radio

[lucifuge31337]

This is EXACTLY packet radio, without FCC-imposed limitations of what one can or can't do with it. While the article is deatiled and pretty interesting, that obligatory /. "is this news?" is still in order. HF packet radio has been around for a long time.

If I can find out what freq they're on, all their mail are belong to us.

Re:Reminds me of Packet Radio

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Pretty funny since there are gateways all over the net for this! You just have to be verfied by the operator of the gateway as a ham. Simple phone call, or e-mail would get initial verification. The next would be monitoring your use and making sure you don't use it for what it's not intended for (ie sending porn to other ham friends). This is the act of being a conrtol point operator. You are responsible for everything your station sends as the control point operator. When using a HT you are both the radio operator and control point operator, but sometimes you are not the one talking. Hence repeaters using volunteer control ops that listen to the local repeater via base station or handheld radio. There IS NO FCC Law or restrictiong regarding the use of packet radio except Part 97. Basically you can do whatever you want with it so long as you don't make money(have a pecuniary interest), and you don't send questionable content such as porn, music or other stuff otherwise against Part 97. Transfering MP3's over packet radio would be illegal as MP3 is music. Only way you could do that was if your the space shuttle (only exception to music in part 97 and this is because of the rebroadcasts of shuttle missions. Part 97 does not have the word internet in it and the word network only comes up once and that's in the line stating that a frequency band in the 220 MHz range is to be used for digital packet backbones. Other then that, this is NOT news. I transmitted a packet e-mail cross country before I ever sent a e-mail across country. HF so far has been limited to about 300 baud. I think the most you can do wirelessly using amateur radio is 14.4k(on 2m and maybe 440). The reason for this is because the faster you want to go, the wider your signal gets(hence the term bandwidth..). That's why there's a restriction for 300 baud on HF Frequencies. This may have changed as I don't really have all that much time to keep up on the digital modes. I don't think much has changed though with the excpetion of a couple guys were expermenting with using lasers for voice and possibly data (Would be THz range for RF I think).

picking nits

[Faggot]

The term 'baud' refers to 'lever transitions per second', not 'bits per second'. Baud and bps coincide at 2400bps and lower; however above 2400bps each baud carries more than one bit of data. Therefore, the term 'baud' becomes incorrect.

'bps' is faster to type anyhow.

Re:picking nits

[BLBishop]

And it isn't really "levels," it's "symbols." A symbol represents multiple bits in modems from 1200 bps up, and some of these symbols have identical levels. Instead, they differ in phase.

SailMail

[linuxwrangler]

This setup is very similar to SailMail which I have used on several crossings of the Pacific. Yes, it's really slow but that's not a big deal when you are just sending a few paragraphs of text around.

The last time I sailed across the ocean last July (in the Pacific Cup Race) we used an Iridium phone with the data option. We were able to send back a couple of digital pictures but the phone bill for the week was something like $200. Next time we'll save the pix till we hit land.

You thought email was insecure BEFORE.....

[FuryG3]

...now anyone in the world can dial in and see your messages.

Seriously though, hams have been doing this kind of stuff for a while, on various bands. BBSes and email are commonly used (and tied together). There are TCP/IP networks (granted, most of them on bands like 2m which have higher throughput) with internet gateways. As a matter of fact, amateur radio operators have their own Class A (i belive it's 44.x.x.x)

PSK31 is used on the HF bands and gives you a real matrix feel. You can see the information coming down throughout the band, and click on the stream to see the text moving through it. Here's a screenshot: http://users.skynet.be/on1dht/media/rxpsk_scrn1.gi f

definitly cool stuff.

73, k6gnu

For those actually interested in this topic...

[DaoudaW]

Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA) have been doing packet radio in the third world for years. Here is their page on communication technology.

The page also describes their LEO satellite system which is just now coming on line.

Re:encryption and ham packet

[kbielefe]

Yes, using SSL or SSH is illegal on the ham bands. The purpose of the "private codes" rule is to ensure that the other rules are being followed. If your transmission is encrypted, how can they know if you are discussing business or downloading obscene material?

Bottom line is, if you want secure transmissions don't use the amateur radio service. If you really want secure transmissions, don't use wireless at all.

However, I don't think the FCC will come after you for encrypting a password, like how hotmail uses ssl for login and then drops it afterward. They've always supported the right of private access codes for repeater control, etc.

I think hams are accustomed to a certain lack of privacy. It's the price we pay for free bandwidth.

73 de KD7KME