This is a bit of a stretch from the normal topics, but in a severe disaster scenario (think Hurricane Katrina or third world country), it may be desired to send real time digital text communication when there is no communication infrastructure in place any longer (i.e. telephone lines are down and the Internet "tubes" were all clogged up).Here is a clever, low budget way to accomplish digital text communication over significant distances with very inexpensive components, namely a HAM radio, a netbook, an open source software application called FLDIGI, and a low tech way of connecting them together.
A clever improvement to this might be to encrypt the text data before its transmitted, which should be possible using a variety of tools, possibly even GnuPG (if the transmission medium is reliable enough to send the complete block of encrypted text without drops).
If you have googled to this project. Also check out the Asterisk project www.asterisk.org. There they have how to interface a fully fledged PBX over ham radio (I believe that this was used in the south pole).
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, Colin. Thanks for sharing!
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