Tech refugee

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[–][deleted] 6 insightful - 3 fun6 insightful - 2 fun7 insightful - 3 fun -  (11 children)

So I've got two routers that will run DD-WRT, which I hear is good for that, but due to burnout I've never sat down and spent the time learning how that works and getting it running. After work or trying to learn some new stupid framework that's worse than the problems it was supposed to fix I don't feel like working on pet projects, which was the whole point of learning all this stuff but by the time I'm free to work on them I hate computers in general and don't want to think about them.

What I did do that may be a little relevant is set up a raspberry pi as a web server hooked to it's own wifi router with no external internet and host a simple stol'd from github PHP 'chat' site that's accessible from phones or computers within the wifi's range. With a couple mesh routers in the mix, I think it would work for what you are talking about. I'll report back if I ever get of my lazy butt and plug 'em 'n boot 'em.

But this is what got me interested in radio and ham. You can run a router and a pi on a little solar panel and battery bank or generator, but in a grid down situation, what would you actually need to post to the mesh net when your mesh is just a router at your next three neighbor's houses? I mean, I know in some far-flung locations today there are mesh networks spreading a single internet gateway over a village or whatever, but outside of sharing a precious single working connection to the outside, there's not much use for a mesh net unless it covers a large enough area to be better than simply going to your neighbor's house or you're constantly monitoring for 'updates' from other users, which will burn critical power. So the mesh only works where you've got enough power for each router node and every device accessing it, or you get 'holes' in the mesh.

Now I'm not knocking it because like I said, I haven't tried it yet. I still intend to eventually. But a cheap (I mean cheap, UV-5Rs are like $30) radio will get you 5-10 miles of voice comms, or much further with working repeaters, with far less power consumption compared to an always-running mesh net ( I assume, I haven't done any math on that). I think that in an emergency of the scale that brings downs telephone and cellular for any amount of time, a radio will be not only more useful, but also more practical than a mesh.

[–]bobbobbybob 6 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 2 fun -  (6 children)

interesting. I was thinking of being able to hook into the existing cellular network and use it for local broadcast based comms - basically emergency broadcasting when the links to the main servers are down. everyone has a mobile phone. With a mesh local network (i live in a rural area, 40,000 people over 800km x 100km area) phones could tap into that if main links down. lots of solar and hydro here, so power not really an issue.

We had an outage on christmas day, when someone cut the cable out to civilisation, and there was nothing in place from any of the emergency systems or (expensive) council backed civil emergency systems.

i'm sure radio is great, but who has one?

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (5 children)

Well, it's pretty hard to "hook into" the cellular network, and will be triply so when the tower's deisel generator runs out (about 2-3 days, less for many towers). Cellular towers are like giant wifi routers. Think of the connection between the tower and your phone like the connection between your PC and your wifi router. The connection between the tower and the rest of the internet is like the DSL line, cable, or optic line coming out the back of your router and going into the wall. This is the hard part about hooking into cellular networks: the way in is through a fiber optic cable that's part of a larger network. The adapters that connect these fibers to the tower's routers are often expensive and hard to find outside vendor networks, and the software that runs it all is usually proprietary and also not easily obtained. It is all but impossible to jack into a tower at the base without exclusive equipment and esoteric secrets. And you can't just broadcast into the tower via a cellular device, the tower doesn't connect devices, it routes thier traffic to a remote server that handles the connections, the tower only broadcasts and transmits, it's a straight through transmitter.

I don't know where you are obviously, but there is likey a radio repeater network in your area for emergency services and law enforcement, and probably a local ham club repeater too. It used to be mostly older folks on the radio, but younger people are starting to lurk there and speak up some, and a CB radio will bring all sorts of intersting things to you, depending on where you live. It's much, much easier than taking over a tower, that's engineer grade stuff, I don't think it can be done without industry specific tools, good luck getting those without landing on the most horrible watch list ever.

I've worked on cell towers from the top to the bottom, inside and out, from field to National Operations Center. Ok, I didn't work in the NOC but I was on the line with them daily. They are too complex and resource intensive for emergency operations not carried out by thier operators. The fuel required for the distance they broadcast is far more than what radio offers, and there's no such thing as 'repairs on the fly'. You don't fix those components when they fail, you replace them. I had the same idea, take over the cell network when it all goes down, but there's just too much logistics and proprietary systems involved.

[–]bobbobbybob 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (4 children)

We have engineers. looking to build a go-to emergency response tech that can be rolled out under emergency response / local and national government systems. i'm in NZ.

We had a failure and none of the existing emergency systems coped. it is like all the people that understand it got old and died.

I feel there is an opening for a new protocol that could be implemented at the operator and local emergency services level. A standard that can be rolled out worldwide for resilience

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

it is like all the people that understand it got old and died

That's pretty much what happened. If your cellular went down, you need to figure out if it was the towers that ran out of fuel, or the server farms that ran out of power, or both. If the tower is up but no link on the fiber, nogo. If the fiber is good and the tower good but no servers, nogo. You get the picture, it's the emergency infrastructure that keeps all this running that matters. These levels of complication compound quickly without structred support. If you go to a tower that has fuel, and you have a tech who knows that carrier's systems and has an authorization password / CAC / whatever to access and make the changes you want to the tower, you can probably do something, but short of any of those, it's going to be rough.

Better emergency response can be had through HF radios, I think. Keeping a repeater tower running is just easier and more efficient than running cellular towers. And emergency services already have radios in their vehicles. I thouroughly support any efforts to get your cellular networks to better prepare thier sites for disater, but don't overlook radios for emergency use. The hard part is encouraging people you know in the area to buy one.

Ugh, I feel like I wrote that with a chip on my shoulder, I'm still new to radios so I'm no expert.

[–]bobbobbybob 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (2 children)

. If your cellular went down,

Fibre optic link to world cut

need some protocol that shifts automagically to an emergency state when main/failover uplinks are lost.

I like radios. I do. But everyone already has a phone.

[–]yetanotherone_sigh 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Most major cell sites have a primary fiber, buried in concrete so that they are backhoe-resistant. If they are really important, they will have a secondary fiber going a different route, so that one singe fiber cut doesn't take the site down. Often this one is not buried at all, but just strung up on a telephone pole. As long as these are still connected to something alive, and everything has power, they work. Some remote tower sites are connected by microwave dishes and daisy-chain several hops to the infrastructure.

[–]bobbobbybob 5 insightful - 2 fun5 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

we are 270km from a city, a single fibre optic link that travels across a fault line. There's lots of PTP airfibre links going in and out of the mountains, but we need something that will work when that fibre is down. an emergency sytem, located at the towers, that can communicate with its other nodes, and elect a boss node when the world is disconnected so that we get more than silence.

This is a software issue, really. some kind of failover routing

[–]yetanotherone_sigh 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

MeshNet has major problems that haven't ever been solved. I've been following it since the early days. You have trunking problems between major far-flung cities. I live in the Western CONUS and my major city (30 miles from here) is over 150 miles from the next major city. Even if you could get the neighborhoods interconnected, you'd never get the cities interconnected. You need long distance microwave trunking and extreme high bandwidth, which requires point-to-point microwave dishes, multiple tower hops, and FCC licenses. No way is Joe Sixpack ham radio operator going to do that for free. Those dishes are HUGE. The equipment investment would be very large (hundreds of thousands of dollars per 40-mile hop) and the licenses are not just available to anyone. The spectrum is very crunched up and in use already.

My plan for the off-grid cabin is going to be Starlink, once they get a semi-portable unit that doesn't use 250 watts.

[–]bobbobbybob 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

i was thinking as more of an infrastructure project for the region. Government backed, emergency response initiative.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Thank you so much for this response. I've always thought meshes were interesting but the logistics involved in anything larger than a college campus or small town WAN just grow exponentially. Scaling up is near impossible, I may try to set up a mesh in my neighborhood with the neighbors I know, but it would just be for kicks if anything.

I have a friend who just got approved to be the first Starlink tester in our area, I'll try to remember to report back when he get's his gear installed. I really don't know what all is involved, I guess some kind of DirectTV style dish?

[–]yetanotherone_sigh 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

That's the idea. It looks like a small UFO on a stick. You point it at the open sky and you get internet out the cable. The first consumer version they have out draws too much power for off-grid use (on the order of 250W). If they can get it down to half that or lower, it'd be good for all kinds of uses such as people living in RVs, etc.