Yes, my father and I ran a GMRS radio system with a phone patch many many years ago. The primary customer was my uncle with his well drilling & service company, along with a few realtors.
There was a 50 watt repeater on the top of a hill, running on the 450Mhz band.
You could have a big pop up box that says "Clicking here will empty your bank account, steal your car, rape your women and children, and cancel your NASCAR season pass on your TiVo" and John Q Public will still click on it.
Most of the non-techies and a lot of techies are sick of "The Browser/OS who cried wolf".
Put an 800Mhz system in the Texas Hill Country...you'll end up with needing a repeater site on every other hilltop.
Put an 800Mhz system in where there's lots of pine trees. You'll discover that pine needles are about 1/4wave long at 800Mhz and make excellent attenuators.
Yeah, good luck with that. If it succeeds, it'll be a portable radio that costs $10K. It'll have to license P25 and SmartNet from Motorola, a couple of protocols from EF Johnson, have MPT1324 (The only real open standard in commercial radio), it'll need wide and narrow band coverage of 150, 450, and 800Mhz.
Sure, it can all be done with a DSP based radio, but someone's gotta pay for the Intellectual Property to make them work.
DVB-S2 hasn't been around all that long, though. Most of the satellite ISPs are using QPSK 3/4 or 7/8s modulation. That'll squeeze you about 45mbps out of a 36Mhz transponder.
And true bulk time is measured dollars per megahertz per month.
TheSync...now there's a blast from the past from my Cidera days.
I'm currently employed by a US-based VSAT provider and I'm the guy in charge of the IP sections and a good portion of the RF section too. Here's my advice and words of wisdom.
1) You'll get what you pay for. Satellite spectrum *is* expensive, so if you're only paying $100/mo for service, you're being oversubscribed to hell and back.
2) Consumer satellite providers mostly share bandwidth by TDM access. They have a large carrier from their earth station that runs all the time, but your transmitter bursts in a duty cycle set by the system controller at the earth station. Its great for downloads, but it sucks for VOIP.
3) The people who say "VOIP won't work over satellite" are dead wrong. It works just fine. We have many customers in the US and several in Europe that use VOIP just fine. However, they're on "dedicated bandwidth", so there's no TDMing. If they're buying 512kbps of bandwidth, they have 512kbps of bandwidth. But they also pay more for that.
4) I don't know exactly how much data and voice you need, but consider BGAN as a possible solution.
5) And, shameless plug, feel free to contact me and we can see what we can do for you.
That's what I have here at home. My BUD is pointed to AMC-4 at 101W longitude. I have a International Datacasting SRA-2100 data receiver connected to a Linux box and that Linux box runs software from Noaaport.net. I get NEXRAD radar data, satellite imagery, weather watches and warnings, and all the computer models. All raw and mostly unprocessed.
The radars take several scans of the sky per "update".
They take scans at.5 degrees of dish elevation, 1.45 degrees, 2.4 degrees and 3.35 degrees. Those scans dissect the storm and look for rotation and intensity in different parts of the storm.
Then the radars take an "echo tops" scan where the dish moves up and down to its limits while scanning horizontal. That lets the radars detect the total height of a storm, which gives another estimate of its strength.
So, its not just the dish spinning around in a single plane.
Probably the same TDM multiplexing that Hughesnet and the other 2-way providers use. Each customer transmits in a burst in sequence. Each satellite has several TDM channels and each channel will support X number of customers.
When I went to purchase a new TV a few weeks ago, the salesweenie insisted that I needed to get something that did 1080p because "everyone was going to switch to 1080p in 2009".
Nevermind the fact that the price between the TV was getting and the cheapest 1080p capable unit was $800. A nice addition to the commission there.
I didn't even bother with a 1080p capable unit because the sources just aren't there yet.
Doing H&W over WiFi is great if your shelter already has internet connectivity. You might get lucky enough to latch on to some willing neighbour's cable modem.
Failing that, you've got some old man wearing his ARRL/ARES/RACES baseball cap carrying around a walkie-talkie.
Out in the field, though, plenty of disaster & disaster recovery agencies are moving to satellite. Pull up with your mobile EOC with an auto-deploy antenna on the roof, push a button, 3 minutes later you've got anywhere between 64kbps and 20Mbps of IP connectivity for VoIP, FoIP, or whatever.
Boeing shelled out a lot of money to start Connexion and then another load of money to stop it. They had contracted with SES Americom to launch AMC-23 to support Connexion over the Pacific. When Boeing bailed out of Connexion, they had to pay out a huge termination clause to SES.
And now AMC-23 sits pretty much unused and SES is having a fire sale on space segment to try to recoup some of the costs of running the bird.
G711 is completely uncompressed. It is 8-bit sampling at 8Khz sample rate, using A-law or Mu-law encoding. G711's average MOS score is 4.4. G729's average MOS score is around 4.1-4.2. That is still quite acceptable.
Our entire VoIP network here runs G.729 and as long as there's no packet loss on the links, call quality is completely acceptable, even though the average latency on one of our satellite links is 500ms round trip.
And the ITSP addons requiring G.711? They require it mostly because they're passing DTMF digits in-band in the audio stream, rather than using SIP INFO packets or RFC2833 RTP payload packets to transport digit information. Any kind of predictive audio codec (such as G729, GSM, Speex, or ILBC) mangles and distorts pure audio tones as part of the compression algorithm. This is also why you can't run modem calls over a VoIP line and have to rely on something like T.38 to pass fax modem traffic.
That's why my favorite station in the San Antonio area was the automated station that played "classic rock". It appears to be gone now, but it would play 5-6 songs, a commercial or two, 5-6 songs, a commercial or two, etc... No annoying DJs, no "50 minutes of music per hour followed by 10 minutes of commercials", no "traffic is fucked up from here to Austin" traffic reports every 15 minutes. Just music.
search for "Free to air" or "FTA" satellite. That will get you the equipment you need for the unencrypted digital feeds. However, for the unencrypted analog feeds, search for "C-Band/Ku-Band TVRO".
C-Band TVRO requires one of those Big Ugly Dishes, so you may have a problem there.
Lyngsat.com gives you a list of transponders per satellite and what's on them. The ones marked "feeds" are the ones used to transmit programs to affiliates or backhaul remote news/sports trucks back to the studios. The feeds are raw, so you'll probably catch some reporter scratching his ass or picking his nose.
Because I have better things to do with my time than dick around with finding hardware that MythTV plays well with, then getting a "distro" installed, then screwing around getting it all set up. Sure, if I was a single geek who lived in mommy's basement I could give it a go. However, like most of the people who would buy one of these, I have a full time job, a full time family, and a full time household to contend with.
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Yes, my father and I ran a GMRS radio system with a phone patch many many years ago. The primary customer was my uncle with his well drilling & service company, along with a few realtors.
There was a 50 watt repeater on the top of a hill, running on the 450Mhz band.
You could have a big pop up box that says "Clicking here will empty your bank account, steal your car, rape your women and children, and cancel your NASCAR season pass on your TiVo" and John Q Public will still click on it.
Most of the non-techies and a lot of techies are sick of "The Browser/OS who cried wolf".
I should probably have RTFA first.
Because 800Mhz isn't practical everywhere.
Put an 800Mhz system in the Texas Hill Country...you'll end up with needing a repeater site on every other hilltop.
Put an 800Mhz system in where there's lots of pine trees. You'll discover that pine needles are about 1/4wave long at 800Mhz and make excellent attenuators.
Yeah, good luck with that. If it succeeds, it'll be a portable radio that costs $10K. It'll have to license P25 and SmartNet from Motorola, a couple of protocols from EF Johnson, have MPT1324 (The only real open standard in commercial radio), it'll need wide and narrow band coverage of 150, 450, and 800Mhz.
Sure, it can all be done with a DSP based radio, but someone's gotta pay for the Intellectual Property to make them work.
Nothing. And you buy dyed farm/off road diesel which has no road tax added to it. There, problem solved.
DVB-S2 hasn't been around all that long, though. Most of the satellite ISPs are using QPSK 3/4 or 7/8s modulation. That'll squeeze you about 45mbps out of a 36Mhz transponder.
And true bulk time is measured dollars per megahertz per month.
TheSync...now there's a blast from the past from my Cidera days.
I'm currently employed by a US-based VSAT provider and I'm the guy in charge of the IP sections and a good portion of the RF section too. Here's my advice and words of wisdom.
1) You'll get what you pay for. Satellite spectrum *is* expensive, so if you're only paying $100/mo for service, you're being oversubscribed to hell and back.
2) Consumer satellite providers mostly share bandwidth by TDM access. They have a large carrier from their earth station that runs all the time, but your transmitter bursts in a duty cycle set by the system controller at the earth station. Its great for downloads, but it sucks for VOIP.
3) The people who say "VOIP won't work over satellite" are dead wrong. It works just fine. We have many customers in the US and several in Europe that use VOIP just fine. However, they're on "dedicated bandwidth", so there's no TDMing. If they're buying 512kbps of bandwidth, they have 512kbps of bandwidth. But they also pay more for that.
4) I don't know exactly how much data and voice you need, but consider BGAN as a possible solution.
5) And, shameless plug, feel free to contact me and we can see what we can do for you.
That's what I have here at home. My BUD is pointed to AMC-4 at 101W longitude. I have a International Datacasting SRA-2100 data receiver connected to a Linux box and that Linux box runs software from Noaaport.net. I get NEXRAD radar data, satellite imagery, weather watches and warnings, and all the computer models. All raw and mostly unprocessed.
500 Baud. You could go to 1500 baud if you had a Model 3
I don't know about you, but none of my router tables have DNS names in them.
The radars take several scans of the sky per "update".
.5 degrees of dish elevation, 1.45 degrees, 2.4 degrees and 3.35 degrees. Those scans dissect the storm and look for rotation and intensity in different parts of the storm.
They take scans at
Then the radars take an "echo tops" scan where the dish moves up and down to its limits while scanning horizontal. That lets the radars detect the total height of a storm, which gives another estimate of its strength.
So, its not just the dish spinning around in a single plane.
8Khz sample rate at 8-bit/sample = 64Kbps
If you record the audio in each direction as a different stream, then you get 128Kbps.
Probably the same TDM multiplexing that Hughesnet and the other 2-way providers use. Each customer transmits in a burst in sequence. Each satellite has several TDM channels and each channel will support X number of customers.
When I went to purchase a new TV a few weeks ago, the salesweenie insisted that I needed to get something that did 1080p because "everyone was going to switch to 1080p in 2009".
Nevermind the fact that the price between the TV was getting and the cheapest 1080p capable unit was $800. A nice addition to the commission there.
I didn't even bother with a 1080p capable unit because the sources just aren't there yet.
Just the Zapateller SIT tone? My blacklist callers get:
"Nobody is available to take your call. They have been carried away by monkeys!" followed by the screeching of dozens of monkeys.
Doing H&W over WiFi is great if your shelter already has internet connectivity. You might get lucky enough to latch on to some willing neighbour's cable modem.
Failing that, you've got some old man wearing his ARRL/ARES/RACES baseball cap carrying around a walkie-talkie.
Out in the field, though, plenty of disaster & disaster recovery agencies are moving to satellite. Pull up with your mobile EOC with an auto-deploy antenna on the roof, push a button, 3 minutes later you've got anywhere between 64kbps and 20Mbps of IP connectivity for VoIP, FoIP, or whatever.
"surplus reference book" and "all-purpose gray tape".
Porn and duct tape!
Boeing shelled out a lot of money to start Connexion and then another load of money to stop it. They had contracted with SES Americom to launch AMC-23 to support Connexion over the Pacific. When Boeing bailed out of Connexion, they had to pay out a huge termination clause to SES.
And now AMC-23 sits pretty much unused and SES is having a fire sale on space segment to try to recoup some of the costs of running the bird.
G711 is completely uncompressed. It is 8-bit sampling at 8Khz sample rate, using A-law or Mu-law encoding. G711's average MOS score is 4.4. G729's average MOS score is around 4.1-4.2. That is still quite acceptable.
Our entire VoIP network here runs G.729 and as long as there's no packet loss on the links, call quality is completely acceptable, even though the average latency on one of our satellite links is 500ms round trip.
And the ITSP addons requiring G.711? They require it mostly because they're passing DTMF digits in-band in the audio stream, rather than using SIP INFO packets or RFC2833 RTP payload packets to transport digit information. Any kind of predictive audio codec (such as G729, GSM, Speex, or ILBC) mangles and distorts pure audio tones as part of the compression algorithm. This is also why you can't run modem calls over a VoIP line and have to rely on something like T.38 to pass fax modem traffic.
That's why my favorite station in the San Antonio area was the automated station that played "classic rock". It appears to be gone now, but it would play 5-6 songs, a commercial or two, 5-6 songs, a commercial or two, etc... No annoying DJs, no "50 minutes of music per hour followed by 10 minutes of commercials", no "traffic is fucked up from here to Austin" traffic reports every 15 minutes. Just music.
Or ROFLDMCB
Roll on the floor laughing dropping my colostomy bag
Sewage run off is fine for Budweiser. It mixes great with the taste of overcooked brats, beer nuts, and engine exhaust at the latest NASCAR 9000.
search for "Free to air" or "FTA" satellite. That will get you the equipment you need for the unencrypted digital feeds. However, for the unencrypted analog feeds, search for "C-Band/Ku-Band TVRO".
C-Band TVRO requires one of those Big Ugly Dishes, so you may have a problem there.
Lyngsat.com gives you a list of transponders per satellite and what's on them. The ones marked "feeds" are the ones used to transmit programs to affiliates or backhaul remote news/sports trucks back to the studios. The feeds are raw, so you'll probably catch some reporter scratching his ass or picking his nose.
Because I have better things to do with my time than dick around with finding hardware that MythTV plays well with, then getting a "distro" installed, then screwing around getting it all set up. Sure, if I was a single geek who lived in mommy's basement I could give it a go. However, like most of the people who would buy one of these, I have a full time job, a full time family, and a full time household to contend with.