Hello world; Newbie guide; Malawi project

Hello all,

I’ve been following the project on and off for around a year. Finally starting to implement this myself. I’ve been through the FAQs and the introductory documentation but can’t seem to locate a newbie guide.

My project is to connect a rural village in Malawi to the Outernet.
Serving up to 50 devices (primarily Windows phones), with some power resiliency and absolute minimal maintenance required.

There seems to have been a lot of progress over the past 6 months specifically. The delivery model appears to have changed quite dramatically from leverage existing satellite dishes to a full DIY kit.

Question: What is the main change from Lighthouse to L-Band and CHIP?

Any thoughts or feedback welcomed. Thanks.

Hi Herman,

IMHO the main change is the change to the L-Band with a much smaller antenna and amuch lower bandwidth. That means a maximum of 20Mb data per day. Transmission of multimadia as in the former Ku-Band is not possible. Now the delivered data is mostly weather and text based news.
Mark Philips runs a feed from his receiver based on the new Skylark OS (running on a C.H.I.P):
http://g7ltt.dyndns.org:8888/
Also a system based on the Raspberry Pi is possible with the classic RXOS.
I am running also a feed, but this feed has added more features, which are not downloaded via satellite, but added via a 64Gb-USB-stick attached to the PI. Perhaps this could be an approach for a remote running system (Rachel-Server, Kiwix-Wikipedia on an external HD??)
http://obereip.selfhost.de

Hope that helps,
Wolfgang

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