Tag Archives: Comms

Alexandru Csete, a/k/a OZ9AEC: open-source/software defined radio leader

The use of computers in conjunction with radio devices is not new: since we’ve been liberated from having to have a crystal, vacuum tube, or transistor specfically fabricated to transmit or receive over particular frequencies, the costs of manufacturing devices which can send and receive voice or data signals has dropped as their flexibility has increased. We’re going to try to explain how this works – and how it works within the United States (i.e. F.C.C. domestically, the International Telecommunications Union – I.T.U., an arm of the United Nations, and F.C.C. equivalent organizations in individual countries). This by way of introducing Alexandre Zcsete, call sign 0Z9AEC (in case readers are wondering, I do not know if the first character is an upper-case letter “O” or tthe number “0”(zero). We’ll be addressing this in a future post or posts; we believe the most elegant solution is to idenify a common, open-source – i.e. F.O.S.S. font which readily distinguishes between the number “zero” and the upper-case “O,” as in “Orange,” “Octagon,” “Oscar” (used by the U.S. Military and Nato, and, depending on your generation, you can imagine The Oscar Awards, Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, or Oscar Madison of The Odd Couple). Without furher digression, we’ll now permit Mr. Csete tto introduce himself, using text from the “About” page on his blog, oz9aec.net.

My name is Alexandru Csete, also known as OZ9AEC. I am a physicist from the University of Aarhus and I work as a development engineer in the antenna department at Thrane & Thrane. Before that I was 8 years in the European space industry working on the Automated Transfer Vehicle called Jules Verne and the Gaia scientific mission.

I have been the holder of a CEPT Cat. 1 amateur radio certificate since 1991. My primary interests today are satellite communications, software radios, digital high-rate modes, microwaves and developing free software for Unix-like operating systems.

It’s my educated guess that Mr. Csete is the holder of a license equivalent to one of the FCC’s amateur or “ham” licenses; we’ll try to pin that down and update this piece. Non- American readers may not be aware of the American-language idiom that “so-and-so” is not a “rocket scientist” is a way of saying that someone isn’t particularly smart, the implication being that being a rocket scientist requires substantial smarts. Alexandru Csete is, in fact, a rocket scientist – or the functional equivalent: he works on teams which use rockets (propulsion systems) to hurl functional systems into space.

At this point, we’re not going to explain how things work – not because we don’t think our readers will follow the explanations.  Contrariwise, we’re pretty certain that if it’s my byline on the piece, we’ll get things wrong – perhaps terribly wrong – and we’d like to avoid that.

Here is one extremely cool thing that Alexandru Csete has come up with: a means of adding some software and some hardware to a PC and directly download NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) satellite images. This  is, on its own terms, quite a feat, but it has serious practical implications: in a crisis, the NOAA servers are at risk of being overloaded, or suffering from power failure. A greater risk is a local power failure or network failure in your neighborhood or region prevents Internet access. Mr. Csete’s application (that is, the combination of hardware and software) provides a direct link between your PC and NOAA’s satellite(s).

 

 

Image(s) retrieved from NOAA on May 23rd, 2012

Yet another good reason that community-based disaster risk assessment, response, and rebuilding should have – among other things – reserve power to keep laptops, radios (both two-way and receivers) and other critical equipment powered. Emergency power is another subject we hope to address comprehensively – although , initially in the form of “posts,” in order to force some discipline in keeping our explanations clear and concise.

If you’re ready to start your swim at the deep end of the pool, with the sharks, gators, and piranhas, you have our admiration and respect, and we wantto hear about it. Start with  Simple APT decoder prototype  on the  oz9aec.net blog. Mr. Csete has his own suggestions for beginner reading and projects in this post: GRC Examples. (“GRC” stands for “GNU Radio Companion”).

Mr. Csete’s Flickr Photostream

Integrated comms systems – bridging multiple two-way radio , telephone, and VOIP systems

Communications-Applied Technology makes this

ICRI-2P

Incident Commanders’ Radio Interface

2pandreel.jpg

I don’t know how long they’ve been making them — but this is the type of technology that New York City cops and firefighters had been demanding for years

before 9/11—that, to a large extent, they still don’t have. So it would seem that, at least at present, the obstacles are political — not technological — to having different groups of first responders communicate with each other.


KE2YK Reports on Ham Radio in Haiti

Ham Radio

Ham Radio

[Many thanks to Bill Seidel of Revanche, a long-time ham operator, for his infinite patience in explaining ham and RF operations. We’re going to try to keep reporting on ham operations in, to, and from Haiti.]

KE2YK’s Random Oscillations reports on ham radio efforts in Haiti. From ARRL Sends Ham Aid To Haiti:

Even though the communications infrastructure in earthquake-ravaged Haiti is being rebuilt, there is still need for Amateur Radio communications. To assist in this effort, the ARRL’s Ham-Aid program is providing equipment for local amateurs to use.

On Friday, January 22, the League sent a programmed Yaesu VHF repeater with a microphone, as well as ICOM handheld transceivers, Yaesu mobile 2 meter rigs with power supplies and Kenwood mobile 2 meter rigs. Comet antennas, Larsen mobile antennas with magnet mounts, coax and batteries were also included in the package that was shipped to the home of the President of the Radio Club Dominicano (RCD) for distribution. All items were donated by their manufacturers.

Haiti

Haiti

“In the horror of this tragedy, there still are stars and the cooperation between the ARRL, IARU Region 2 and the Radio Club Dominicano and has been bright,” said ARRL Media and Public Relations Manager Allen Pitts, W1AGP .

“It was donations from our members and friends that began the Ham Aid program in Katrina’s aftermath. Now once again, that sharing between hams will provide help in another worst-case incident. ARRL members and donors need to know that their gifts will be used very well indeed.”

How You Can Help in Haiti

Continue reading →

On The Media: do reporters disrupt disaster response logistics?

In Danger In Numbers, On the Media Host Bob Garfield interviews Noam Schreiber of The New Republic (transcript here).

Are large numbers of journalists displacing rescue workers and supplies, in part by competing for scarce resources on the ground? This is an excellent discussion, and typical for OTM, an outstanding weekly effort to provide feedbacks to inform and correct journalism.

To answer this with regards to Earthquake Relief efforts in Haiti we need to know:

  1. How many journalists and support staff went to Haiti?
  2. How they got there? Did they displace transportation resources, or generate new ones?
  3. What did they bring in terms of supplies and money?
  4. What they consume, in terms of supplies and other resources?
  5. How much information are the able to get out of the country? Did they increase outbound bandwidth? This information isn’t used just by the “public” – it is, and should be, integrated into the intelligence stream. This is an extreme example of open-source intelligence – because it’s essentially a non-military, non-adversarial incident.
  6. Did the journalists facilitate or develop enhanced outbound transportation facilities? Did they make medevac space available, albeit inadvertently?

To answer this question, originally posted by OTM listeners, we need a census of journalists and their logistical operations.

It’s true that Haiti needs a lot right now – starting with an airlift of ham radio operators, historically volunteer can-do communications personnel in big emergencies. (We believe that Haiti likely has insufficient local ham operators, but we haven’t been able to fact-check that). The organizations whose members have been doing this for decades are

Finally, there’s Brian Steckler of the Naval Postgraduate School and its exemplary  Hastily Formed Networks Research Group.Professor Steckler, his students, and others were able to restore telephone service in Mississippi during Katrina within hours of arrival.

Their after-action reports, (critical documents here) indicate that they were substantially delayed by “celebrity” fly-overs – forcing them to drive

equipment from the West Coast to the East. They still got it done.

Having studied these issues for several years – if I find myself in a disaster with one outbound message, I’m calling Professor Steckler.

We hope to follow this post with additional coverage of communications and logistics issues relating to the current crisis in Haiti.

Zero Geography: GPS Real-World Gaming in Hybrid Space

Zero Geography reports on a real-time game using GPS devices which has – for our purposes, interesting applications for coordinating SAR or other response efforts. From Zero Geography: GPS Real-World Gaming in Hybrid Space.

A real-time, multiplayer, GPS game for mobiles is being played out in the real-world. The game, played by groups of four or five people, uses a one kilometer radius around any point on Earth to delineate spatial extents in which three or four chasers try to capture one runner. Each one of the players is tracked via a GPS phone and their coordinates are mashed onto a map that they can all see. The only twist that that the runner is always allowed to view the map, whilst the chasers only have access to the map every six minutes. The game is a fascinating way to roll elements of the physical and virtual together into an adrenaline-pumped experience.

Zero Geography is a brilliant blog about matters geographic by a person, persons, or entity named Mark Graham, who is otherwise reticent about identity or contact information. Check it out.


ICT4Peace: community radio project in Sri Lanka

From ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace) – posted by Sanjana Hattotuwa –

In May this year, a colleague and I went to Nissankamallapura, Pollonnaruwa to strengthen online journalism capacities of a group trained in community radio production and had a decent production studio conveniently adjacent to an ICTA Nenasala. This groups was very interested in using the computers and internet access literally next door to their studio to publish and promote their productions on the web.

They called their station Saru Praja Radio and told us they were the first community in Sri Lanka to ask for a FM radio frequency to air their productions across a footprint of 48 villages in the Pollonnaruwa district.

Engaging as an Ashoka News & Knowledge Entrepreneur, this was a great opportunity to work with a rural community of well trained radio journalists, who had pinned all their hopes on a license to broadcast over a terrestrial radio frequency, on how the web could complement their terrestrial broadcasts and importantly, serve even as the primary dissemination model in the event they did not receive clearance to go on air.

The significant and enduring problems of existing community radio initiatives in Sri Lanka are well known and documented. It was very unlikely that Saru Praja Radio would get a license to broadcast, and even if they did, would be allowed to continue if their productions critically interrogated issues such as service delivery by local government, corruption and the rule of law, which the production team were very interested to cover.

The first thing I did was to set up a website for Saru Praja Radio, that ran WordPress on the backend and register it for 3 years. I chose WordPress because it is scaleable, robust and easy to use. Further, the skill-set learned in maintaining the Saru Praja website could be easily transferred and leveraged to support other individual or collective citizen journalism blogs / initiatives in these 48 villages. There was for example significant interest in covering issues related to the psycho-social spill-over effects of the war by individuals in the production team.

Our first day was spent talking not about technology, but what the production team wanted to achieve through Saru Praja Radio. We asked them how many people had access to the web and internet, how many had mobiles, how many had radios with CD players, what level of participation they had from local government and the Police, what kind of information would be most useful to the peoples in these 48 villages, how their production team was constituted, what equipment they had and how they intended to sustain the radio productions. Our intent was to shape our engagement based on socio-political, economic and technological ground realities.

My colleague and I were pleasantly surprised at the speed with which concepts such as citizen journalism, blogging and the differences between the broadcast model and web based journalists were grasped by the production team. On the final day, several members were even setting up their own WordPress accounts to blog in Sinhala, and all were proficient in the use of WordPress as a platform to upload, manage, share and archive their radio productions.

From community radio to Internet radio, mobiles and narrow-casting: New models for enduring needs

Wired/Washington Post: Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line’

Another reminder of how effective government can be once it’s decided to be vigilant:

A construction crew working on an office building in Virginia in 2000 severed a fiber optic cable that wasn’t on anyone’s map. Apparently it was a ‘black line’ used for carrying secret intelligence data, according to sources who spoke recently with the Washington Post.

Within minutes of cutting the cable, three black SUV’s pulled up carrying men in suits who complained that their line was severed.

“The construction manager was shocked,” a worker told the Washington Post. “He had never seen a line get cut and people show up within seconds. Usually you’ve got to figure out whose line it is. To garner that kind of response that quickly was amazing.”

Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line.’

Fiddler on the Roof hd

Hard-Boiled hd

The Forbidden Kingdom ipod




FastRadios.com

We’ve been casting about for two-way radio vendors – and sophisticated advice. And found, for our purposes, an amazing oufit in FastRadios.com – based in Naples, Florida – but they sell at very competitive prices and on very competitive terms (extended warranties, for instance, on batteries as well as radios). After a long conversation with Manzie Lawfer (purportedly their sales manager, but it seems that his function is more about finding configuration solutions). Lawfer was able to propose simple, elegant and inexpensive solutions to certain problems we’ve been having in designing a model comms system for community-based disaster response organizations. Being a natural-born cynic, and having spent most of my career cross-examining and interviewing all manner of fabricators and prevaricators – and being concerned about budget – I dropped several opportunities for him to propose more expensive solutions. Straight arrows, it seems, these guys. Look for several posts about solutions they’ve devised for clients – including using existing UPS systems in power failures and solar power in emergencies to keep comms up. Readers may want to start with their “Little Green Radio Book” (free).

Rescue Streamer – exceptionally well-designed emergency signal device

We’ll have a longer post later, but for now, we’ll say that the Rescue Streamer is brilliant. This tiny (when stored) banner greatly increases the probability of being seen from overhead – one doesn’t need to apply Bayes’ theorem to figure that out – and also has the following attributes:

  • not subject to battery failure
  • no training required
  • no fuel required (as in triangles of signal fires)
  • no fire starting required – and no risk of, for instance, starting a forest fire – when what you really wanted was to be rescued
  • not prohibitively expensive (by any stretch of the imagination)
  • works on land and water

Safe, non-toxic, effective, inexpensive, easy to use. Apart from our interest in emergency preparedness, this is a fantastic example of excellent engineering.

We hope to be following up shortly with photographs and more information about the development of the Rescue Streamer.