Wednesday, July 6, 2016

MeshMS over 4km via UHF

Another short post as I try to get on top of everything at the moment to say that on our last trip to Arkaroola we successfully tested the UHF packet radio functionality over a distance of about 4km.  This was from the observatory ridge to Coulthard's Lookout.

With the setup we were using, we had about 50% packet loss, and jet LBARD kept persevering, and delivering MeshMS messages within a minute or so.

We did see a recurrence of a bug affecting a corner case of LBARD operation, where sometimes you have to send a 2nd message to flush out a stuck first message.  However, this should not be too hard to fix.

This weekend I fly out to Samoa to meet some folks there to talk about our AusAID / Pacific Humanitarian Challenge grant to run a pilot using Mesh Extenders there, and it will be nice to show off the UHF functionality while there.

2 comments:

  1. For efficiency could we program a router to become an access point to the Serval Mesh? Rather than become dependent of wi-fi and UHF in the Serval device we have another more way: regular ISP.
    I have ilimeted traffic on my Internet connection and I don't mind grant access to Serval Mesh. I have in mind this is an hybrid solution, but could speed deployment of this wonderful idea.

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    1. Yes, of course it would be possible in principle to use the internet to link locations. Then the challenge is to build an appropriate distributed hash table type structure to allow each such unit to find each other.

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