On 10/11/20 14:03, Stuart Longland wrote:
I'd imagine for repeater linking, you'd be wanting sufficient bandwidth
for RTP streams. Would DMR be capable of this or would we have to look
to other solutions?
I hadn't even considered DMR (by which I assume you mean C4FM). Waaaay
too slow and inefficient. I was thinking either of WiFi on
point-to-point microwave a la AREDN, or some new medium speed modem on
UHF non-line-of-sight links. NPR could be a candidate, though I don't
know about its multipath tolerance.
None of that is any use for linking internationally,
which is one of the
draw-card use cases for things like IRLP, EchoLink, AllStarLink, … etc.
I'd imagine we'd need some sort of high-speed trunk links over HF radio
for that. Seems like a tall order in solar minimum.
Admittedly I am biased by living in southern California, but I was
thinking about the large linked repeater networks we have here. Some
networks include dozens of mountaintop repeaters spread across several
states linked full time. Traditionally a lot of that linking was done
directly between hilltops on (hidden) analog UHF links, and I'm sure
that today much of it is done over the commercial Internet.
At least until the US gets its own QO-100, the regular Internet is
likely to remain the only practical approach for long haul links, but
it's certainly within the realm of possibility to move many of the
intrastate or adjacent-state links to an IP network on ham frequencies.
Phil