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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!"
If you think about it, much of the last 2 decades' innovations and progress have had the effect (deliberate or not) of making life (at least for those who could afford it) more open and footloose. The company I work for used to have a Chicago address, just because nobody would believe that a large, international, reputable organization would be based in Salt Lake City. Nowadays nobody even thinks about that sort of thing. Even now, with telecommuting technologies, it's not necessary to have all your employees come to the office every day. Maybe in the future, the term "headquarters" will be obsolete, because organizations can be so distributed.
Okay, it's a little off-topic, but the article makes me think about the steps we're taking, technologically, and where they're leading.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
This isn't really anything new. The first successor to long copper lines in the US were microwave links. Plenty of other developing nations have been using wireless links to reach far flung small villages for a while now. One of the big examples of this has been Chile.It is especially useful in mountainous areas. In rough terrain it becomes cheaper to put up two expensive microwave towers that it is to pay for the labor of stringing copper or fiber.
The opinions expressed above are those off one side of my brain, the other side and my employer may not agree.
I remember hooking up my Commodore 64 to a ham radio and downloading programs via packet radio. More fun than tape!
supports this already through the ax25 modules?
This ties amateur ax.25 protocols directly to the Linux kernel. Works great, lasts a long time.
I suspect the "commercial" modems in use were transmitting in something other than ax.25, probably sitor/amtor/pactor, but it's all about the same at 300 baud.
The advantage with Linux is that you have to configure one driver for tcp/ip as opposed to dealing with the mgetty and ppp nonsense in the article.
This is really the core of the train of thought in Africa. Most of the central African governments are looking at 802.11 type net access as a cheap alternative to putting in expensive infrastructure like telephone lines.
In South Africa it's even more interesting: there is a definite shove in getting broadband net access working - and working well. In fact, the recent de-monopolising of the Telecoms Company Telkom has finally opened the door for broadband.
The key advantage, however, is somewhat ironic - in fact, the reason is simply that Africa does not have any decent infrastructure to begin with, this makes it easier to climb in with the leading pack and use leading technology from the start.
The problem with 802.11 is however that it is unreliable. I've had the opportunity of working with a few wireles net-frastructures using 802.11 to connect a multitude of willing volunteers to various wireless wans and lans. Unfortunately, the best uptime stats we had was around 89%, comparable to the 99.9% uptime we enjoyed with one of Africa's biggest ISPs namely iAfrica.
African countries have been connecting rather well to the net over the last few years, and doing so beneath the radar for the most part. It however will most likely not become the multi-million dollar industry like it is in the western world, but the key importance of connectivity in remote African cities and Towns is not to establish capitalistic approaches, but rather bring vital services to poverty stricken people, and offer them the opportunities that many dream the Internet still carry.
Recently I visited a very poor school where the classrooms were the great outdoors and they had one blackboard to share with several teachers. Some students were older than the teachers. The amazing thing was when I saw these kids faces when they saw a pictures of Africa and the rest of the planet we downloaded off the net via Satellite shown onto a makeshift projector screen.
Stories like this should not surprise people. What surprises me is that people in the western world still think us Africans ride lions and chase each other with spears. Africa is poor, but their is a lot of technological knowledge about. And we have that one advantage...
"Diplomacy --- the art of saying "Nice doggie" 'til you can find a stick." Wynn Catlin
I used to dabble in Amateur Radio, mainly 2 meter packet. In those days, about 8 years ago, there were a number of digital HF schemes. About the best of them was Clover -- an AT-compatible board that used its own modulation scheme and protocols.
One problem with HF is that the ionosphere has a large, time-dependant phase dispersion. It really procludes wide-band schemes unless someone can come up with something very clever.
The Clover board claimed 500 characters per second, under good band conditions, through a 25 Hz cw filter. At the time, there was no HF scheme that came close.
I have no idea if Clover still exists -- maybe someone on Slashdot can enlighten us.
Decent infrastructure has more benefits than you can imagine. My dad works for the World Food Program and that org has used many different technologies for communication throughout the world.
At his last post (Nicaragua) they used Toyota Land Cruisers to get around. Those vehicles were equipped with a multitude of antennas, including some to communicate in the UHF range. For more remote locations they used motorcycles to transport satellite phones where needed. Now he's heading up operations in Angola and i'm not sure what sorts of techs they use there, but i've heard talk of satellite phones and in the capital, Luanda, he uses a cel phone (talking to him from MI, USA is a pain, phone cuts out and is quite laggy).
While starving sucks, it sucks even more when you can't communicate with anyone that you are hungry. In the past it was necessary to physically visit every single location to see how situations were there. Now, with better communication devices, when something serious happens (hurricane, landslide, refugee influx, etc) it can be communicated much quicker, response times are faster, and more lives can be saved.
-f
www.blackant.net
Anyone notice how the author spends the bulk of the article talking about a mail setup using the prorpietary qmail MTA (which has a look-but-don't-touch license that's in many ways more restrictive than Microsoft's Shared Source) and then goes ahead and praises it as being Open Source in the last paragraph?
It's funny the LinuxJournal editors didn't pick up on this (the article has already been published in print). I mean, there's nothing wrong with using proprietary software where it's the best option, but calling it Open Source is a bit unfair to both the original author of the software (Dan Bernstein), and the developers of actual Open Source MTAs like postfix, exim and sendmail.
I don't belive they disallow gatewaying to the internet. As I posted earlier, the whole 44.x.x.x class a is delegated to amateur radio operators. Many try to set up tcp/ip networks independant of, but connected to, the internet. Now, when it comes to browsing pr0n from your laptop using your 2 meter gateway at your house, that's a different story. First, things like that aren't allowed on the HAM bands, so you could go buy a license for buisiness bands or something, and second, downloading celebrity nudes at 19.2k probably isn't my idea of a grand time.
I've used my kenwood th-d7 to irc many a time, but on private channels where i know nobody will be swearing etc.
Encryption is not allowed, but I must say that I'm guilty of visiting the occasional ssl site, and I'm not totally sure how the FCC feels about that.
-k6gnu
Guinea possesses major mineral, hydropower, and agricultural resources, yet remains an underdeveloped nation. Let's ignore the mineral part, and note that agriculture is probably to mainstay of most of the population. Internet access, by supporting better agricultural management, will help improve productivity in this area. For example:
Market and commodity information to assist in export
Botany, the science of plants including pest control, plant breeding, etc.
Etc.
Maybe they don't wire to find out what a Big Mac tastes like, but they may ask about financing export, funds for development projects, scientific information on crop cultivation, etc.
There is more to the Internet than games and pr0n.
"dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope"
Actually, yes. Typically, a "click" (pop your tongue against the top of your mouth) is represented as an X. For example, there is an African language known as Xkosa, pronounced click-kosa.
(The only reason I know this is because my Natural Language Processing professor spent most of the first lecture in September using Xkosa an example.)
Intercarve Networks, LLC
About the 44.0.0.0/8 block, more info can be found by its maintaniers..
http://hamradio.ucsd.edu/
Actually, baud=bps at 300 ONLY. 1200 bps is 4 bits per baud at 300 baud, 2400 is 4 bits per baud at 600 baud.
14.4 is definately not the fastest you can go.
The GRAPES and WA4DSY modems are (I believe) 56k units, designed for 440 and above. (One of those might be a G3RUH-compatible 9600 design...)
In Europe, 76k on 440 is common, and the Baycom folks have quite a bit of hardware for this.
Some guys in Slovenia are doing 1.1 Mbps in the 1.2 GHz band.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
So is any encryption planned? There are some sections of West Africa that are still politically volitile. I can see where field workers, such as Doctors Without Borders and/or missionaries and/or UN Officials might not want their information intercepted.
... but I'd hate to see the same technology triangulated against them.
I realize that sending and receiving individual messages should be strongly encrypted, but that still doesn't necessarily obfuscate the sender or the receiver. I mean I'm glad to see such email used as the article says " the radio equipment, providing an essential lifeline for the safety and security of field office and mobile unit personnel"
--- have you healed your church website?
Except it requires rather difficult to obtain ( for the no- techie ) licenses here in the US
/me ducks as all the amateurs start throwing rocks for such a suggestion. )
Opening that up to the masses here would help solve that 'last mile' problem,
among other things.
(
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As long as the encrytion or compression technique is pubicly documented, you can use it on amateur packet radio links. This allows us to use gzip compression in http, email, ftp, etc. and allows for simple password protection
I was reading this until I got to the description of the PPP link and remembered the days of UUCP over serial lines. Since the modem took care of the error correction they could send much more data more quickly by using straight serial UUCP instead of trying to get a PPP handshake to get TCP/IP working. A UUCP chat script was always faster than PPP in my experience.
Kris
Kriston