Mesh/7 February 2013

Attendees

Alcides, Marc, Jenny, JC, David, George, Miguel

Notes

• Ham Radio Licenses allow for broadcasting up to 50 watt at 2.4Ghz
  • Free class to procure ham radio license in one day at Noisebridge March 17th
  • Has to be amateur / not paid-for services
  • Can't be encrypted (What does that mean for HTTPS?)
  • Definitely an area that needs further research!
• Hook into Downtown Berkeley WiFi?
• Hackerspace Darknets (accessible to other hackerspaces)
• CJDNS
• Bounce a signal off the moon / other satellites
• Direct connect several nodes (Andrew's place/Vagabond Ballroom; Mark B's House, Adeline House, Sudo Room, Media Alliance, node in East Oakland)
• Need for directional antennas
  • Should we make antennas?
  • Lasers?
    • 10 mbps (RONJA)
    • Not good in the rain

• Location triangulation

• Suggestion: East Bay Communications Resilience Group

• Software-defined radios
• Low-bandwidth radio receivers
• Boats in the bay could receive long-distance comms, for instance

• OpenBTS
• MonkeyBrains as backhaul for a mesh network
• Burning Man Community / San Francisco dark fiber opps

• JC - mobile ad hoc mesh network
  • CB Radio backpacks for berkeley protest peacekeepers as inspiration for mobile ad hoc networks
  • Starts with communication (voice, over data)

• Solar power system for mesh box and mobile phone

• Pay phones as mesh nodes for anonymous hot-spotting

• Peet's running on a mesh backbone?

• Open Mesh - uses batman-adv, NG firmware
• ALIX
• AIS - boat radio communications
• Emergency Broadcast Band - airwaves set aside
• Cognitive Radio to detect currently broadcasting signals

• Alameda Country Computer Resource Center

Projects

• Mobile ad hoc networks
  • 4GB of data to sync across the nodes
  • Using git to update the nodes
  • People moving around feeding the network
• Mycelia - geospatial mapping via decentralized databases for inventory management, project and skill matching (talk to marc juul and jenny if you want to work on this project!)
• Router Reuse Program - Proposed sudo room project :D
• DC415 - DefCon mesh in SF

Action Items

• Inventory / Donations of hardware
  • Open call to hackerspaces for surplus routers / wifi devices
  • ANTAC wifi cable modems
• Base repository of information
  • See for instance The Pyre: http://thepyre.org/wiki (talk to jenny)
• Get a mesh node running at sudo room!
• Field survey trip to visit existing nodes
• Box in a Bag for activists