Iran makes it clear that we need a "ham radio" network of wireless communication

Just like the ham operators and the old bulletin boards, given that there were wireless gateways made specifically to gateway local traffic to other gateways and "learn" routes, a mass of modern "ham-ers" would take up the call.

Consider, just Cantenna's (or other highly directional antenna's) used to direct "backbone" traffic just 300 meters down the road to the next link location.

I would...it would be cool to stick it to the local providers.

The question is, will the manufacturers create such a device so that it can be maintained reasonably?

What say you DU?

to rely on corporate communications. We will need our own pirate antenas and networks

effing MICHAEL JACKSON makes it clear.

from 1AM early Friday, through early afternoon Friday, i could not get a decent connection to the interwebs, via Comcast/co-ax anyway. seemed like the entire net was on Defcon 2. i had to switch to wireless via mobile phone as modem to get anywhere.

nb: it's not MJ that is "effing" really, it's the amount of traffic which the event generated. i liked MJ and wish he could have gotten/taken help sooner.

:hi:

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Those were the days of corporal punishment and earned me welts on top of the torture that it took to get me to translate one of the messages.

My response ... yes it is!

I Live in the Verdigris Valley,Bordering both the Flint Hills To the west and the Osage Prairie to the east (Eastern Kansas)
Every Car,Truck and House has a C.B.radio....the only Cell Service we get is touchy at best and nonexistent at worse,so we all have the ability to "Daisy Chain" an emergency call out to the county sheriff's office...24 miles away.

i do think that the old fashioned ham method does make the operator a target with the big antenna that's necessary. hope there's a different way to get it done.

Even a very highly direction dish would be no bigger than a satellite dish (and a tv dish would probably work)

along with many research Professors in many disciplines. He told me the story they told him. That as soon as we started chasing after Bin Laden and Al Qaeda with our best high tech tools Al Qaeda went low tech and non tech. They related a story where messages were sent through tv ads, where the local person selling whatever, like those local auto ads that communities get to announce the car dealers latest sales, and that there would be some visual indicator that relayed a specific message. For example if the person talking in the ad would be standing in front of his shop window and there would be a sheet of paper taped to the bottom left part of that window it would mean something different than if it was taped to another part of the window. The sheet could be anything like a simple flier so if any official or police looked at it there would be something totally innocuous and innocent on it.

I believe the Iranian revolutionaries will do that now. And I also believe they will go underground and become resistance fighters. Unfortunately that's what violently oppressive governments create with their actions.

Your best bet is with high frequency point-to-point "nodes" or stations.

So basically, you're talking about a mesh network with a very fault-tolerant protocol.

It could be done.

VHF packet radio, using TCP/IP.

Note date on page. 1992.

VHF is notoriously easy to jam and hard to confine to a narrow beam like microwave frequencies.

I was just musing about setting up ad hoc "pirate" nets that are relatively easy to set up and harder to be detected or jammed.

I think the OP was wondering about setting up a "citizen's net" that would be robust and hard to detect or block by authorities.

...at which directional antennas are reasonably small -- 35 cm. is a half-wavelength-- but not hard to assemble. Coax and stuff could be ordinary cable TV stock -- 75 ohm and type F connectors.

The tolerances on higher frequencies like 2.3 GHz make for engineering problems if you're trying to do it all from the home center or hardware store.

The radios are available from the Chinese on eBay for $80. Or use FRS/GMRS stuff -- it's bubble-packed at Cabela. The rest is just software and connectors. Security comes from encrypting any text sent (PGP/GPG), and robustness from the use of TCP/IP, and a large cloud of transmitters, not from the choice of frequency.

I'm not an electrical engineer, I'm a Latin teacher, but if the shit hit the fan, people I know and talk to every day could have something up and running in 72 hours. Spread spectrum in a week.

For a local "cloud" or mesh-type network, low power 440MHz nodes would be fine.

But for a long haul (for instance, between towns), you don't want to be using such a low frequency (spreading, interference, low data rate). I'd go with at least 800Mhz for long distances as many ISP's are doing now for remote wireless access.

And it depends what you want to send. Voice? No problem. Data? Ok, but don't expect live video or huge file transfers in a short time.

It's an interesting proposition, though.

that's ancient history.

wireless mesh networks - that's the future of off the grid communications in this web2.0 world. add this to easy to setup/free web servers for most any platform you use for your computing needs, and you've got yourself a network the man can only kill by cutting the power (of course anyone serious about this would have a UPS system or something to that effect).