AREDN over a GEO satellite.
 It might be possible to extend the range of AREDN (Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network) links over a GEO satellite. An excellent Emcomm use of such a GEO satellite. I will leave the discussion to the AREDN mesh experts.... https://www.arednmesh.org/aredn-advantage |
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The hard part is shopping for a service provider and especially paying for it. I used to set up VSAT terminals all over and it's expensive.
Using AREDN over a GEO would be totally do-able, but the quality of service would all depend on the extra 530ms of latency. So if you’re watching a webcam or doing a VoIP call that happens to transit that sat-link it will have some latency, but will work fine if it’s UDP traffic. If you’re engaging any service that uses TCP and requires an ack to continue (like file transfer or email). There are ways to fix that by adding latency with a proxy running on something like a Raspberry Pi. But this is all do-able. During an EmComm situation I have a BGAN terminal that I will connect to my network and allow access to selected services on the Internet instead of piping a node's AREDN network traffic through a VSAT link. The BGAN will allow us to access aprs.fi, Winlink, VoIP PBX, and other emergency sites. We could do the same with the VSAT - as long as your service provider's ground station still has power and Internet access. -Damon K9CQB |
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AREDN certainly works over a commercial satellite without any problems:
https://southpasradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/02-2019-QST-Dully-AREDN-Mesh-B2V.pdf So having one or several GEO amateur radio satellites available would be a revolution in amateur radio disaster communications. It would add high bandwidth, wide-area services to the amateur radio toolkit, and greatly expand the capacities and usefulness of amateur radio in those situations. The main challenge would be managing available bandwidth during a disaster, just like with commercial satellites. As Damon says: this is all doable. 73, Oliver K6OLI |
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AREDN at the San Francisco Fleet week 2019.
Lets add a GEO sat to their Emcomm system ! https://www.arednmesh.org/content/aredn-san-francisco-fleet-week-2019 |
KC9SGV
Oliver K6OLI
