05/11/2006
PSKmail 'green' software?
I was invited to deliver a 1-hour presentation about pskmail yesterday at the Dutch Ham Convention. About 100 Hams attended the presentation, and it was good to see that nobody left the premises during the speech. Actually people were standing at the back of the room.
From the quality of the questions asked after the presentation it became clear that most of the audiance had understood what it is all about, and the reactions were generally quite positive. We got rid of some 6 Live CD's and we even managed to get some people interested in experimenting with a pskmail server!
One aspect which I had not thought about is that the QRP- and narrow-band nature of pskmail makes it quite useful for countries where digital infrastructure is not as abundant as we take for granted. And where the super-commercial Windows OS is the one which has the widest use in the world we westerners know, this picture may become quite different as soon as the new MIT Linux PC gets its feet on the ground in the rest of the world. You might say that pskmail is the first application software written for a situation where connectivity to the internet is not available for everybody.
We are following the first installation of a pskmail server in South America with interest. If all goes well it will be situated in Quito, Equador. An environment where a lot of hams cannot afford an internet connection in the first place. This will provide us with a reference installation in the developing world which will generate a lot of ideas for making pskmail even more suitable for that kind of environment.
One if these ideas is to extend pskmail with an RTTY FSK mode. That would allow users to use a simple CW TRX for the transmit side, and to use gMFSK + a simple DC receiver for receive. The RTTY_ARQ protocol specification is ready. Unfortunately there is no suitable Linux software which generates a signal for FSK like MMTTY does for windows; all programs are AFSK based.
Could we get an FSK output on gMFSK? Who can spend some time on this?
The alternative is to develop a simple AFSK_to_FSK converter, but the software solution will be less expensive!!
12:20 Posted in PSK-mail development | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
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Indeed. I went to a mini-conference that was about installing com gear in third world countries. Off the top of my head, http://www.greenwifi.org/ greenwifi was there. The main focus seemed to be was using mesh-wifi networks between villages and then using VOIP to provide phone service. It is cost prohibitive to use satelite to connect to "the grid", so they were just going to keep the systems local only. I thought that if they put a HF station at the "main" village, that they could recieve small information headlines, email between nodes or more importantly the market price of their crops. (middle men made them sell way below market price because there was no way for them to know). Not voice, but I think it would help them a great deal all the same.
Posted by: macmouse | 07/11/2006
Hoi ook ik heb de lezing met veel intresse aangehoord, en zit nu te klooien om een opstart cd te maken met lunix maar nog niet veel sucses.
Mijn pc wil er niet mee opstarten. maar hopelijk kom ik daar nog achter.
Het is overigens de eerste keer dat ik een mede Camper gebruiker en dan ook zendamateur ben tegen gekomen terwijl ik toch al aardig wat jaren met de Camper rond toer.
hopelijk kom ik je nog eens tegen onderweg.
groeten Jan Pa3epl
Posted by: Jan | 14/11/2006
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