There is a group of us in Central Virginia (ARES/RACES of Virginia District 3, which includes Albemarle, Buckingham, Cumberland, Fluvanna, and Greene Counties) who are in the design phase of a large-scale mesh network for EmComm primary use here.  The current home for our activities is my personal site, http://www.kq9p.us.  Have a look!  Comments, suggestions, accusations of insanity are welcome at mike@kq9p.us!

73, Mike KQ9P

I've been in development/test stages of my mesh nodes. Got a PBX up and going along with two voip phones as proof of concept. With any luck tomorrow I might be able to show case it to some of the club members. 

If you go the 5.8ghz route what hardware are you using? Would 2.4ghz be able to join that mesh?

> setting something up between the Stafford County EOC and Stafford Hospital Center.

Saw this post on the list and can't help but think what a terrible idea this is.

I know that one of the primary selling points of mesh is emcomm but it's a bad idea on several levels.  It's not secure, and for the most part uses off the shelf consumer gear at Part 15 power levels in an ISM band. That's fine for Field Day, not fine as a critical link.

I can't believe anyone in an official capacity (hospital and EOC staff) trying to establish a link for a hospital would even entertain the idea of hams showing up with modified consumer routers as a solution.  And, consider the ramifications if for whatever reason it doesn't work when they need it most.

My opinion, if this was a plausible idea they could do it themselves with commercial gear running a secure link and not have the inherent limitations this ham system has.

Mark K5LXP

Albuquerque, NM

In my opinion, ham radio is great at ad-hoc, in the moment immediate communications.

But it seems in this case and many others ham radio is being sold as a replacement or backup to existing commercial systems, which I believe is wrong and anymore, not even technically viable.  I believe it is negligent that any official entity would write ham radio into any kind of backup plan instead of engineering a proper solution.  Ham radio is indeed "when all else fails", not when just the primary system fails or when there's no budget for the backup, so get the hams to do it for free.

As time goes on I see this issue waning, as ham radio becomes more and more technically irrelevant and it becomes wholly impractical to consider.  But I wince at the idea of a group of hams today showing a hospital, city or other group a pretty powerpoint show on mesh networking and seriously selling them on the idea this is a valid backup plan.  The only reason I'm sure they'd entertain it is because it's "free" or nominal hardware cost.  I see this as a situation where the hams end up quickly over their head, or laughed out of the place if the group/agency does due diligence and sees just what they're getting on a hardware and networking level.

Now, if this was a system intended to be used between hams and not directly by a "served agency", then I would see no problem with it.  But there's a user expectation that when given a TCP/IP connection you can run whatever you want over it, and in the case of BBHN you can't.  Now, to show the flip side of this anyone can take off the shelf wifi gear, create a link or network and run secure and commercial data over it.  Make it a BBHN network, and now you can't.  What value is this adding for any served agency?  They'd be better served to just do it themselves (and they should be).

Hi Derek, The Ole Virginia Hams in Manassas is discussing setting up a BBHN node at their repeater location at NOVEC, 10323 Lomond Drive. Ole Virginia Hams: w4ovh.net My node is up in Centreville, its posted on remoteamateur and here on this sites googlemap mesh map. 73, David, kk4zuu

Hey sorry I dropped off the radar. My emails are a mess and trying to clean and sort things out. Yeah I'll look into this project. I am definitely interested in seeing what can be done. 73 kk4qgd