Thought the rest of you might be interested in this. Karen thought that
a product she'd seen, which snaps onto a smartphone, might let our team
communications take place over longer distances. She sent me a link to
the product, which is a snap-on radio.
d/
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: smartphone as walkie-talkie radio
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2016 07:13:37 -0700
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker@xxxxxxxxx>
Organization: Brandenburg InternetWorking
To: Karen Vaughan <Karen.Vaughan@xxxxxxx>
Karen,
Thanks for the link. The use you have in mind would certainly be
helpful for FAST, since it would extend the reach of team communications.
There appear to be two basic kinds of smartphone products in this realm.
This one simply adds radio to the device, but doesn't link it to
cellphone use. So the reach of the device is roughly the same as for
any other hand radio, because that's what it is. The convenience is not
needing a second device to do radio.
The other kind uses the telephone to make a regular cellphone call to a
relay on the Internet, and the relay has access to radio. If there is a
relay for the frequency bands we use that is within reach of our radios,
that could be helpful... but only f the smartphone has a good cell
connection. Note that at the REI race, we didn't have cellphone
coverage, either.
At last night's meeting, Peg made reference to another effort, through
the chapter's DST (tech) folk (well, really, one guy.) That involves
just radio and no phones. There /are/ some radio relays in Silicon
Valley and one of them might be useful for us. I've started
investigating our use of it.
Our current radio use is direct. Radios talk to each other directly on
a single frequency, and their reach is limited by terrain and buildings
and the like. (We might be able to get some improvement for this, if we
attached a tall antenna to a radio at the FAST base station, but I
haven't found an easy way to do this yet.)
With a relay, radios talk on one frequency to the relay and the relay
re-broadcasts the signal on another frequency, which the radios listen
to. The relay uses a more powerful transmitter and because it sits up
on one of the area mountains, it can hear signals over a larger area.
Once I figure out how to program our radios, we'll probably be able to
use this immediately.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
