With the poor line of sight to the satellite here in the Pacific Northwest from two locations, I’ve been looking for a solution. In one location, there’s a mountain in the way. In the other location, it’s trees. With a dish, I can reliably receive the signal through a small opening in the forest canopy.
For the last three months, I’ve been experimenting with Terrestrial LoRa and LoraWAN. LoRa is basically is a point-to-point protocol that can transmit characters or binary data. The Othernet signal is carried using LoRa. LoRaWAN is used in Internet of Things applications, mostly for sending data from sensors back to a central point. I have several LoRaWAN gateways that collect temperature, humidity and GPS location and pass them off to a server. They run in the 915MHz band. I’m impressed by LoRa’s ability to pass through the dense foliage here in the Pacific Northwest.
Could LoRa/Othernet be used to extend Othernet coverage from a ground station that can see the satellite broadcast it to places where it cannot?
@Syed take a close look at the RN2903. It looks like it could be re-flashed for LoRa/Othernet.
How about a three Dreamcatchers setup, One to receive the satellite signal (in a good reception point), the second to transmit the terrestrial signal, the third would receive the terrestrial signal and support the webpage.
Lately I have been learning about Amateur Radio mesh networks. It’s called AREDN. I have a 5 GHz 13" dish pointing to a mountain top about 10 miles away line of sight. The radio is in the feedhorn and the output is Ethernet to a regular PC. It’s powered with a PoE injector device. I’m a node of a small local network within the 5 GHz ham band.
You’re lucky… My data links are about 10 to 15 miles over the hills and valleys… So I’m stuck with
1200 and 9600 baud, running multiple bands to try and limit interference. (my node has three active port links on the common 2m 220 and 440… just because it’s easy find radios and antennas). We keep only one sending and one receiving station on each frequency… so no COS delays. - no multi-cast - all point to point
Interesting that HamWAN doesn’t mention the word Mesh, even though it looks like it is. Look up AREDN. This the the International mesh network for hams.
I have a few router setup with Hsmm-mesh. I think it’s been pretty much replaced by Arden net. Although, there aren’t any hams close to me and the closest big cities are 1.5 and 2 hours away. Kind of sucks being in the middle of nowhere with nobody to play with.