Two of the most rewarding aspects of ham radio for me are
technical challenges and operational missions. My electrical engineering
background has limited use in my day job as a technical leader for a Fortune 50
insurance and financial services company. Tactical missions (events, problems)
are also not a part of my regular work as I focus on 6, 12, and 18 month
strategies. I’m most content and excited when I can take my love of engineering
and apply it to real missions in real life!
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| K9ECB - Erin - Using AREDN mesh to retrieve weather and soil data. |
For me, that’s what the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network
(AREDN) is all about. I’ve shared here before about using AREDN’s mesh software
to provide access to our D-STAR repeaters.
My daughter has also started usingAREDN to gather weather data from a home-brew Arduino weather station located
in a corn field away from power and internet. Our local emergency management
organization is considering a build-out of the mesh with remote pan-tilt-zoom
cameras to be used for weather spotting. This use case provides us the ability
to watch approaching storms from the EOC to confirm and augment our spotter
teams. And hams in Southern California are working with emergency management
teams to provide live video and audio of events.
The concept is to take commercial off-the-shelf (COTS)
technology and re-purpose it into a mesh data network. Unlike my early days of
playing with 1200 baud packet on the AMPRNet 44.x network, AREDN is using 2.4,
3, and 5GHz ham allocations with TP-Link and Ubiquiti gear to provide a mesh
network with speeds over 100 Mbps.
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| An omni and point to point AREDN 5GHz mesh site feeding a D-STAR repeater. |
For some parts of our hobby, the barrier to entry is price.
That’s not the case for AREDN. For under $100 you can have a working node. With
some careful purchases from eBay and some bargains from online retailers you
can have a fully functioning mesh of 3 nodes for under $200.
When I play with HF, I never know who I’m going to find,
what mode I’ll end up using, or if I’ll have a ragchew or a short contact. Mesh
networking isn’t like that. It isn’t even like VHF/UHF repeaters. “Meshing” is
about setting up some base infrastructure in an area and then using it for
specific purposes (like my D-STAR repeater or weather spotting example) or
preparing for on-demand deployments (like the Southern California local
emergency management use case). There are groups in Tennessee doing large
exercises passing incident command system (ICS) messages via Winlink that is
self-sustaining on an AREDN mesh. There are those using Raspberry pi voice over
IP gateway and IP phones to provide communication between tactical and command
teams. And there’s even a group with an HF radio controlled across the mesh
providing long distance off-internet communications using an existing station
rather than doing a field-day like setup at a command post.
The core AREDN development team is made up of six
volunteers. Because the software is open sourced, other assist, modify and
customize to meet their needs. Depending on your level of interest, you can
code and hack away or you can install the software and just stay in the
graphical interface. It’s more than working with computers, as understanding
microwave antennas and limitations are important for a successful
implementation. Sure, you can plug-and-play two nodes in a hamfest parking lot
and have a mesh. The real challenge comes when you want to build a data
backbone between multiple sites and provide reliable service to your mission!
There are over 600 hams that have connected and registered
on the
AREDN.org website to interact with other hams wanting to do similar
things. Thousands more have downloaded the software. The AREDN just released
version 3.16.1.0 of the firmware bringing with it support for new devices,
faster throughput, real-time stats, and other operational management features.
More impressive is that the team released a substantial upgrade in December.
This team, with help from beta testers and early adopters is on pace to have
two major releases each year.
The amateur radio community is quite diverse, both in people
and technologies. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed experimenting with AREDN and with
using it for a mission. If your local ham community is interested in a new
challenge, especially if you’re looking for a way to get the next generation of
hams involved, consider getting involved with mesh networking and AREDN.
