[HamWAN PSDR] Facts about ham fundraising

[Tom Hayward]

I'll take a stab at a few of these points and defer the others...

On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Rob Salsgiver <rob at quailsoftltd.net> wrote:
> 2)      End-users (individual):  We need to get more of our core online and
> well versed in the system.  From those early users we need a few in each
> county or metro area that are willing to do site surveys and interact with
> other potential end users to get them onboard.  We need to focus on our
> marketing, getting the message out (with success stories), and more end-user
> demonstrations – not just the equipment, but from an application standpoint.

I'll come out and do a site survey anywhere in Pierce County.

I'll run a custom propagation model for anyone anywhere. This will
tell you how tall of a tower you need to get HamWAN. HamWAN covers
everything within 100 miles of a site if you have a tall enough tower
;-)

> 3)      End-users (EMCOMM):  We need some served agencies online.  We need
> advocates outside of the ham world.  Hospitals, Red Cross, Emergency
> Management offices, Salvation Army, maybe even a mobile station.  If we have
> 3-4 hospitals, Red Cross chapters, or similar served agencies successfully
> hooked up, we have a working demonstration platform to work from.  Even
> then, basic connectivity isn’t.  We need hams in these locations to
> demonstrate on an applications basis what can be done “when all else fails”
> over HamWAN.  If we can convince 30-50 different served agencies to shell
> out the cost of a single cell phone each month to support a dedicated
> Internet connection that is disaster-resilient, then you have up to
> $2500/month coming in to support the infrastructure.  Demonstrate email, web
> access, and maybe even some specialized goodies targeted at them – use
> D-RATs for a tactical “chat” interface between locations – who knows?  Maybe
> interface with other digital gateways or extend over other RF links
> (D-Star?).

The Snohomish County EOC is online with HamWAN. I'd like to see other
EOCs come online, but we don't have contacts there. HamWAN could be
very useful for EOC-to-EOC communications (sending video, phone,
etc.).

If you have contacts in the EmComm world, talk to them! Or see if we
can schedule a presentation.

Heh, D-Rats is a patch to make D-Star useful. We can just show them
email, "Look, you can still use Outlook!" Service decoupled from
network: awesome.

I don't see Internet as the end goal of HamWAN. HamWAN can facilitate
communications between hams. EOC-to-EOC communication can take place
completely over the HamWAN RF network, until a hole opens up in the
earth and swallows one of our sites. Then we just route around the
outage with Internet; communication continues.

Tom KD7LXL