John: I suppose that 900 MHz might be an option. We do have some 900 MHz commercial Internet services in the area though. With some careful coordination we might be able to do that, but there's limited bandwidth in that band. I suppose we could also do some medium speed networking right on the 440 band, again carefully.
2.4 GHz also has at least one active service provider in this area, but then anyone who uses that for wider-area transport of distribution of Internet services in populated areas should have their head examined anyway. We have thought about building a higher-power 2.4 GHz network on the Ham portion of the band based on some of the available commercial and consumer equipment (properly packaged of course). That would likely interfere with the provider, but their services are problematic for a whole slew of reasons, one of which is in the picture below. http://www.w8cce.org/images/watertower3.jpg Believe it or not, this is a commercial Internet provider's installation in a water tower also populated by other critical communications services. They've actually been interfering with a number of services and will likely be thrown out in the next day or so if they haven't already. This installation also caused interference to our emergency exercise recently, causing us to have change frequencies for operations nearby. Somehow I can't feel sorry if our operations interfere with someone who does this. There may also be some opportunities to do some of the network development in association with a regional Broadband cooperative that has recently incorporated, so there are other options--it's good to be active in your community and be in touch with everything going on. Chuck - N8DNX John D. Hays wrote: > You might also want to consider the 900 MHz. stuff, longer distance and > about T-1 speed about $1K per link. > > Bob McCormick W1QA wrote: > >> >> Having a few megabits per second of bandwidth may not >> be a bad idea - especially if you implement 23cm DD. >> >> For the normal ERP limitations in the 5.x GHz bands >> some of those distances may be excessive for any >> link you would call reliable. But since it is >> public safety already - see what they have done/used >> for intersite linking. You may be able to design your >> own network -- and then have a couple of Internet >> ingress/egress points in the network ... making it >> fault tolerant and reliable. >> >> > > >
