A number of hams around the US are modifying 2.4 and 5.8 GHz WiFi routers to be used at data bridges. The software being developed has features for re-routing a path should a particular node becomes unavailable. D-STAR and other DMR systems all use eithernet to get to the Internet. All of these systems can just as easily be transported over a wireless MESH NODE network. What we need is bandwidth with less interference. We are currently blessed with a number of microwave bands that go under used. We need to develop ham WiFi networks that operate at 3.4 GHz and some of our other bands. For long haul paths the new NW Digital radio presents some possibilities at 70 cm.

The same applies here - there must be long-distance linking
backbones to bridge those gaps - temporarily it could be
the Internet but long-term it needs to be wireless.

We received the equivalent of 1/2 of what was taken at 219-220
Mhz.(about 1996) specifically for point-to-point linking. 97.303l
(http://www.w5yi.org/page.php?id=202)

Tony,

I'm not so sure it needs to work as you're describing; what I see is that the mesh networks should back up the Internet in areas where they are practical, and link to other areas using other means in case the Internet is down, ss well as linking in smaller node clusters where such exist.

As far as Winlink goes, there are even ways to cope with a loss of Internet there; it all comes down to a desire to be less dependant on commercial networks that may not be a priority in a specific incident case and having the alternative tested and working.

If we could get back the piece of 220 here that UPS took, then
wasted, perhaps that could be dedicated to the purpose?

Not trying to start a flame war (but probably will...  I'm sorry in advance), but I feel it's important to point out.  Anytime you go from analog to digital, audio quality/information is lost.  If you go from D* to DMR, you are taking spoken voice (analog) and making it digital (IMBE) in your radio, the repeater receives the bits and spits out audio again (digital to analog), and encodes it AGAIN as digital (AMBE) to be sent to the received, where it once again gets converted to analog.  That's two A-D conversions...  each loses quality, and at these bit rates, we don't have much budget for dropping additional audio info.  People already complain about it sounding tinny!

SO, for me it's not a religious "thou shalt not inter-connect technologies" argument, it's more of a "the sacrifices made MAY make such a project technically unfeasible"

Just food for thought.

Not trying to start a flame war (but probably will... I'm sorry in advance), but I feel it's important to point out. Anytime you go from analog to digital, audio quality/information is lost. If you go from D* to DMR, you are taking spoken voice (analog) and making it digital (IMBE) in your radio, the repeater receives the bits and spits out audio again (digital to analog), and encodes it AGAIN as digital (AMBE) to be sent to the received, where it once again gets converted to analog. That's two A-D conversions... each loses quality, and at these bit rates, we don't have much budget for dropping additional audio info. People already complain about it sounding tinny!

SO, for me it's not a religious "thou shalt not inter-connect technologies" argument, it's more of a "the sacrifices made MAY make such a project technically unfeasible"

Tony,

Exactly; all of the DV technologies I mentioned use some form of AMBE, so it's a matter of conversion of bit rates and constructing the proper carrier code for the target system. We already have code for D-Star amd can write code for DMR and NXDN as well. The hardest part will be converting from FDMA to TDMA and back, as the time slots could both have information on them that needs to be handled in some way.

Maybe your all confused...  audio doesn't have to come out a speaker to be analog.  To be perfectly clear, the dv-dongle is still converting a digital signal to an  analog one...  and a second chip is required to go into any another digital code. Even if a lossless digital codec is used in between (like wave or similar), the conversion to a lossy format like AMBE is the troublesome one...  not the conversion to analog. Yes, less signal is lost vs going out a speaker and into a  microphone, but the principles I stated before are largely the same, and I'm not convinced the resulting stream of bits will be legible audio.

As for the conversion from fdma to tdma, if NAT can convert ip addresses, this should be easy.