Spam ? - AMRAD efforts on Gulf Coast project

[Frank Gentges]

Gents,

Samudra, N3RDX, has gotten together some assets from Bangladesh and they 
are currently on their way to the US.  They can provide broadband 
connections over a distance of at least 30 kM.  The owners of these have 
agreed to divert them from the original purpose and to make them 
available for use in the disaster.  His pearler email provided more detail.

He has been in contact with the Red Cross and they are interested in 
deploying the system.  The concept is to connect to the Internet via a 
T1 circuit on one end.  On the other end, we at AMRAD need to think 
through just what we can connect to be useful in the disaster relief.

My first thought is to connect in a number of VoIP telephones.  We could 
use the little VoIP adapter that Maitland used at the AMRAD van demo at 
the VWS Winterfest.  With several of these we can connect each to a 
Western Electric 2500 telephone.  These telephone instruments are old 
and not too fancy but they are really rugged and will do the best job of 
functioning in the heavy and harsh use we can anticipate.

We should also provide at least an Internet web browser so telephone 
users can search Anywho.com or other sites to find telephone numbers of 
people they want to call.  We need to look into options for the computer 
and display.  Additional computers would be very useful for web browsing.

The BMSTDRA units Samudra is providing need 24 volts at 3.4 amps.  We 
could use a pair of deep cycle 12 volt batteries.  We will need to power 
up an Ethernet switch, the telephone adapters and the computers so we 
need to think through how we would do this.  We will need to provide 
charge to the batteries so we also need to figure out how to do this.

The Red Cross will consider funding some of the parts of our setup so 
don't just think of stuff out of our own personal stocks.  We should 
show them a resourceful approach that does not spend a lot of money.

We also need to come up with a deployment, training and support approach 
so the system will go down and be setup and operated.

We will meet after tacos tomorrow, Sep 3rd to go over all this. 
Normally we would gather at ARRL office but Paul is out of town. 
Instead, the best option is to meet in Samudra's apartment which is only 
a few blocks from tacos.  He will arrange for us to park as guests.

Frank K0BRA