Living in a rural area and such I am not on the leading edge of technology. Yesterday a fellow ham made me aware of NPR-70. 440, 100khz wide, 50kb/s Data over radio. Would this be a viable means of piping internet to a tower site for one voice allstarlink node ? de Steve NU5D
Looking at the specs,
High baud-rate, up to 500kbps on 70cm band
And that it uses existing ipv4 without gateway / conversions,
I would say yes, it is viable if executed well.
The issue you may have may be distance and signal strength. or just S/N ratio.
You would need point to point antenna system, being directional beams pointed at each other.
All in a effort not to disturb the freq any more than needed, but to actually achieve a good signal to noise ratio and not be disturbed by other use of the freq.
That is the only insight I can bring to it.
To bad it was not 1.2ghz as that would have peek my interest myself.
I have to much qrm in UHF. Data needs to be pretty clean or you are going to end up with rejected frames that slow it down past what is tolerated by asterisk. And that can be a issue even with wired internet.
It’s only as good as the weakest point. Latency is the issue.
So know that potential speed is not the same as actual speed of the throughput.
But I am sure myself and others would have a interest in your possible success if you try this.
I get best results with 300mbs on 5.8ghz lan links.
And it looks like you would have about the same money involved.
Use you ham skills making a good point to point antenna system perhaps with old mini satellite dishes if it is that far away. Check google for guidance on that. People do it all the time.
Just some extra thoughts.
Someone likely has other/better ideas.
Hey Steve, their website quotes 47CFR97 as limiting this to 56kbps
GeorgeC W2DB
George, that 56k baud not bps.
500kbps
After giving this some more thought…
I think this would not be viable for ASL/Asterisk for one main reason.
I believe this is a half duplex system.
Perhaps if you had 4 units. 2xTX and 2x RX to make it full duplex.
I don’t think the buffering can help you out with asterisk and there is some headroom in just protocol data.
Guessing it’s effective throughput wold be less than half than the rated speed as half duplex with good signal conditions.
But it sure seems interesting and looks to be handy for many things.
Like a remote console, even for asterisk.
It’s described as a packet system. As others mentioned, you’d need duplex as well as continuous duty (otherwise the node would disappear from the network when not in use). Consider Ubiquiti products if you have a short path.
The “usable data rate” of 65 kbps in the US-legal mode is not quite enough for Allstar Link which needs about double that (based on my observations). Broadband (AREDN) works fine, if you can get a 2.4 or 5.8 GHz path.