[Battlemesh] HAM Radio?

[L. Aaron Kaplan]

On Mar 29, 2012, at 2:51 AM, Ryan Hughes wrote:

> I wonder if anybody knows anything about incorporating HAM radio into the mesh.

Hi Ryan,

I am a ham operator myself. in Austria there is a "Hamnet" which incorporates BGP (and by the way also the Freifunk Firmeware with OLSR :)) ) 
So, that was already tried and done and it seems to work very well. The Hamnet in Austria covers the whole country as a backbone network.

The trick is that the ham community is allowed to use higher txpower (hence longer distances) BUT that comes at a price!
According to regulations you are not allowed to transport content over ham networks. Hence you are essentially only allowed to talk about the weather and other trivial things.

> 
> I live in Ann Arbor.  There's a guy setting up mesh networks in Detroit, which is like 80km away.  There's no easy way to get a line of sight, but I'd like to connect our cities.
> 
> I heard a rumor that IPs in 44.0.0.0/8 are reserved for HAM radio use (true?).
> 
Yes, that is true. Again, ham networks are not allowed to be interconnected with the Internet (or any other commercial network) except for reaching the hamnet itself (like in a VPN).


> Does anybody have experience with this?
> 
> Can you either:
> a) Talk about it with me, or
> b) Give a lightning talk about it?
> 

Yes, I could if I would still be at the WBM

Greetings.
73 de
OE1SYS
(Aaron)