First pick your mountain....
The problem with trying to do many projects at once is that you think they are all linked together. Setting off you quickly find that nothing is as easy as you thought and then deter others from following you because it looks so difficult....
So what's the problem?
I have a lot of data transmission projects that are individually pretty much proven technology but are sufficiently different that interfacing them to demonstrate a data network that is flexible enough to deal with the variety of equipment in use by Radio Amateurs but able to cope with the wide range of conditions we may have to deal with in delivering emergency communications.
What do I want to tie together? Well in order of increasing speed; – AX25 Packet Radio, capable of 300 Baud on HF frequencies through to 9600 Baud on VHF/UHF – New Packet Radio better known as NPR70 which will run up to 500kbps on the 430MHz band where propagation is reasonably well known – AREDN which is a microwave based mesh network capable of multi megabyte transfers if you don't have any hills in the way or have some nice friendly tower blocks to put infrastructure on....
But that's the physical layer of the TCP/IP model, what glue will hold this together?
Well internet protocol of course, what would be easier? At the moment it feels like almost everything :–( AREDN has it's own way of allocating IP addresses in the 10.x.x.x range, NPR70 also issues IP addresses from a pool that you allocate to the master node and AX25, well AX25 isn't an IP networking protocol and the way most Radio Amateurs would use it is to connect to local Bulletin Boards. Luckily the G8BPQ node software looks like it will deal with linking slower modes into the faster IP ones but first I have to get that far !
“Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts.” Londo Mollari in Babylon 5:“Ceremonies of Light and Dark”
Having started to catalogue my innocence in trying to make this work, blundering along on my own when others I'm sure have put all this together, next post is probably going to have to be a picture of what kind of network I want to put together to form a bit of a reference solution along with the 'why'....