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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.
to use this service, you need to send them 2500 which will be reimbursed when they transfer the rest of the money out of their respective repressed country!
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
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.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
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.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Before this, they were using carrier pigeon to transmit email. Just establishing a connnection to the mail server was a bitch.
Tiny bandwidth, monstrous lag, and packet loss caused by German machine guns.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
I would assume that nigeria could easily fund getting the whole country high speed bandwidth. I cannot begin to tell you how many emails I get a day from nigerians that wish to send me millions of dollars just for doing a simple bank transfer.
Got Code?
A doctor could email a hospital of some symptoms in the field and get a reply of what the illness and proper care for it is. Although the individuals wouldn't get a benefit directly there would be an indirect benefit.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
...now anyone in the world can dial in and see your messages.
i f
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.g
definitly cool stuff.
73, k6gnu
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
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.
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).
Gorkman