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News Archive
To
optimize this website and to speed up loading, we have
archived all news previous to 2011 in a .PDF file you
can download and/ or browse. All news from January 2011
and later is displayed below.
D-Star MN Network News Archive 2006-2011 PDF (10Mb)
D-Star MN Network News Archive 2006-2011 PDF (10Mb)
Latest News
2/18/12: We have an article about
best practices for emergency medical response in the
Winter 2012 issue of CQ VHF Magazine, pgs. 16-20.
2/7/12: Repeaters for Fargo, Duluth and Little Falls have arrived and are being installed.
2/6/12: Anoka has their system up on the gateway :)
1/22/11: Icom America is supporting our idea to make an agressive statewide buildout (Duluth, Little Falls, Fargo) of D-Star(r)gateway systems. This will be used for the Red River Flooding (US Coast Guard Auxiliary) and Central Minnesota Hospital Project and even MS-150 race. The only issue - each site requires dedicated Internet at around $30/month, and localized support. Packet stations were install and forget.
12/31/11: This recent talk by the head of Amateur Radio/Emergency Planning for the FCC is fascinating. The best part is the Q&A at the end. Note the reference to personally installing D-Star stacks in his local county.
http://arvideonews.com/dcc2011/2011_DCC_Catastrophic_Communications.html
12/28/11: KC0WLB B 444.325 + is operational on USROOT. We ordered the DSL for our winter site and are deciding which of our high end sites is the permanent home for this system.
12/10/11: Icom shipped us an RP-2C / RP-4000V package and instructions to get it up on the Trust Server right away. That took a few days ... Now we can see what it can do.
11/19/11: We got the HSMM-MESH (tm) OLSR code working. In our lab it supports our main trivnetdb application. Next we want to test the IP phones. This is very cool stuff and a big day for us. We are going to build at least one go-kit with six routers, a thin client phone system/database and D-Star ID-1 uplink. The idea is you get to a disaster scene and you can just drop off these routers and plug in your phones and laptops and then get connected outside to the backbone. No long wires are needed. Note you cannot have a "user station" laptop connect to the mesh router itself wirelessly.
11/17/11: We ordered a pair of Nanobridge 5-25 radios with the large dishes and 1000 feet of the outdoor rated Toughcable Cat 5 and matching grounded connectors.
11/15/11: We have a new working group meeting location (3rd Saturday- 10:30 AM- Macalester Plymouth United Church) and re-flashed 18 Linksys WRT-54GL 1.1 routers with the HSMM-MESH DD-WRT + Mesh.
9/20/11: All the Ubiquiti gear was delivered to Doug N0NAS for the TwinsLAN 2.0 project. We are going to have an interesting Marathon- we will need to run three D-Star uplinks out of the data trailer to three of our repeaters as we have some thin clients down, which provide DNAT.
9/11/11: The remarkable news reports of the F16 pilots who went into the air basically unarmed on 9/11/01 remind us we were unprepared back then but are now. A lot has been accomplished, particularly in the area of national first responder training and interoperability. Interestingly, ham radio was ready for 9/11, in a fairly primitive state, but has not evolved much.
9/10/11: The TWINSLAN 2.0 network project was launched today. With funding from Dan Skripka, we have ordered the 801.11a/n gear. The idea is to establish a area wide mesh backbone running TCP/IP on 5Ghz. Then our various user access points (packet, D-Star etc) can attached to the backbone. Packet is too slow to be an effective choice here. We ordered Ubiquiti Bullet M5HP and Ubiquiti NanoStation M5 NSM5 5GHz 2x2 MIMO units. These will be re-flashed to OpenWRT and mesh. The (HSMM era) debate on encryption has been re-opened- our position - as a long time provider of large scale emergency medical commmunications - routine encryption is not allowed or needed on Part 97.
9/3/2011: Concept of the day: "Mass Calling Event" - we don't have these.
8/15/11: We are staffing up for the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon on Sunday, 10/2/11. There is a volunteer web site, and even a job description for us- way at the bottom- Amateur Radio Communications. There are four teams- 154 volunteer slots- Net 1(Mpls), Net 2 (Mpls/St Paul), Net 3 (St Paul), and Net 4/Data Team (St Paul).
http://volunteers.marathonguide.com/volunteerregistration/twincitiesmarathon.cfm
8/14/2011: The September Emergency Communications issue of QST was underwhelming. I think we have seen enough primitive Go-Kits and the force fitting of proprietary, obsolete technology (Pactor/HF) onto every problem seems contrary to FCC Part 97 where the preamable uses the words "state of the radio art"
8/1/2011: If you have not taken at least the FEMA IS-700a course, now is the time. There are many references to exactly what we are doing here. Marathons, cache radios, span of control and backup radio plans are called out.
7/3/11: We are proud to annouce we have established and tested three large, self managing communications teams in our area who have proven field experience in organizing large public service medical events. We have on purpose stepped out of the hands-on role for several events to encourage new leadership to step up.
6/21/11: The Bakken Radio Club (Anoka, MN) has finished the 2 meter and 1.2 DV/DD additions to their very nice D-Star repeater system. They are trying to get the Trust Server going and are a bit side tracked on an emergency response trailer project so their second site is not on the air yet.
6/20/11: Second hand reports suggest that our enthusiasm for creating formal ICS paperwork may not be fully shared by our served agencies any more. I think we need to be helpful in this work, but in general, if we are helping say a County, none of our folks (ham radio volunteers) would be in the document (like a Form 205) in an official role. So a more "background" rather than "foreground" approach seems best. In our events, we are part of the volunteer event medical staff, and will develop an event medical communications plan (like a draft ICS 202) but will defer to the relevant government agencies in all cases for formal published ICS materials. This is one of our bits of magic we have that no one can take away or match - in a crisis, we (ham operators) will always, in the form of "muscle memory" establish a "net control" and then a formal communications structure in a crisis. This is what Incident Command is trying to do in the last few years, but we have been doing it since the invention of radio.
6/19/11: We heard there was a request to move electronic medical record files by radio during the 2011 Minneapolis tornado response. We are happy to support this, under the following general guidelines:
1. Needs to be a written request from a served agency- back of an envelope is fine.
2. The FCC Part 97 test for crypto use should of course be passed- no other way to move the data, emergency, life and death etc.
3. We would prefer medical records to be encrypted by the served agency as needed and to not ask us to store them - what crypto software to use is a good question - and how distribute keys.
4. If we are running a non-Part 97 network, then #2 can be bypassed.
This is an issue with modern electronic medical records- at our events we use paper charts- which can be slipped under the stretcher strap when you transport a patient - but the world is moving to electronic records. It might be easier to use a USB stick and move the file that way.
6/17/11: We found a bug in the newest AX.25 Linux stack at STPONE and took the packet side back offline. We also rebooted MNSTP, and found out the packet is on COM2 on the Linux box- no big deal.
6/13/11: STPONE is back online. It was the primary power supply- we have had good luck with 11.5 amp open frame switchers we get from Radio City for packet sites, and the SEC-1223 units we put in the D-Star node sites. Packet is also back there, at reduced power.
5/29/11: We got a note from the US Coast Guard Auxiliary. They have people all over the area, providing flood relief lately. For the Red River operation, they are asking about D-Star. Our advice is to get some sites lined up (City water tanks are ideal), and think about putting in packet right away. D-Star repeaters linked to the Trust Servers are a good idea after that. At $3000 each or so, getting a large number of full fledged repeaters plus the Internet needed could be costly. The idea is to get started, and see if a system provides value.
5/24/11: The new to us Neoware CA10 thin clients ($9) are great. They run on 12V at less than 3 amps. The idea is we can load up Slackware, the newest Trivnet database code and the back end to the repeaters (DNAT, mini web site etc.) and the new failover code from Max.
5/20/11: TWINSLAN wants to develop a Part 97 radio microwave linked computer network in our area. One thing to add on is IPV6. D-Star DD Mode, which uses Ethernet only, is for user access from trucks, etc. and should not care about IPV6 vs IPV4. This might be good to test. IPV6 may be more challenging to hack.
5/15/11: Eight Neoware CA10 thin clients ($9 each) have been shipped to us. These are five years newer than the current deployed units and do not have power supplies, which are a suspected failure mode.
5/14/11: Another new, 600 foot repeater site has been made available. One idea is to buy a new D-Star controller ($1400) and use parts we have to develop another site. TWINSLAN needs an R&D site anyhow- as the current repeater fleet (5) were deployed in an operating, high availablity public service network and are not available for hardware development purposes any more. The need for hands-on experimentation at the workbench level is critical now.
5/8/11: We need a work party meeting or two and a site for these. So far, an idea from Max is to develop fail-over on Linux thin clients at our repeater sites. The idea is you have two, and each checks on the other. If one goes down, (stops responding to pings) the other takes over. We have several down right now and need to replace them.
5/7/11: We have a new source of revenue for our operation- rental of our modest fleet of donated surplus laptops. These are not valuable but go to a used children's clothing sale twice a year for a point of sale/barcode application. The idea is we can now finance keeping those machines up to date on batteries and expand the number of laptops slightly. Two go-kits of eight stored in separate locations seems about right. More clubs need to look at a source of income, as donations are not plentiful, as radio group members do not depend on repeaters for routine mobile communications any more.
4/21/11: Dan Skripka has provided 2x $500 Public Health grants for our network. Linking sites, emergency power and newer thin client hardware are on the list. Also a D-Star controller for a repeater for TwinsLAN would be helpful.
4/2/2011: We are getting set for event season. We also need to replace our Linux thin client fleet which are getting old. There are lots of choices. There is a lot of study on linking going on. The 5G Ubiquity gear looks ideal. The 2.4g spectrum, even in rural areas, is getting very congested.
2/7/12: Repeaters for Fargo, Duluth and Little Falls have arrived and are being installed.
2/6/12: Anoka has their system up on the gateway :)
1/22/11: Icom America is supporting our idea to make an agressive statewide buildout (Duluth, Little Falls, Fargo) of D-Star(r)gateway systems. This will be used for the Red River Flooding (US Coast Guard Auxiliary) and Central Minnesota Hospital Project and even MS-150 race. The only issue - each site requires dedicated Internet at around $30/month, and localized support. Packet stations were install and forget.
12/31/11: This recent talk by the head of Amateur Radio/Emergency Planning for the FCC is fascinating. The best part is the Q&A at the end. Note the reference to personally installing D-Star stacks in his local county.
http://arvideonews.com/dcc2011/2011_DCC_Catastrophic_Communications.html
12/28/11: KC0WLB B 444.325 + is operational on USROOT. We ordered the DSL for our winter site and are deciding which of our high end sites is the permanent home for this system.
12/10/11: Icom shipped us an RP-2C / RP-4000V package and instructions to get it up on the Trust Server right away. That took a few days ... Now we can see what it can do.
11/19/11: We got the HSMM-MESH (tm) OLSR code working. In our lab it supports our main trivnetdb application. Next we want to test the IP phones. This is very cool stuff and a big day for us. We are going to build at least one go-kit with six routers, a thin client phone system/database and D-Star ID-1 uplink. The idea is you get to a disaster scene and you can just drop off these routers and plug in your phones and laptops and then get connected outside to the backbone. No long wires are needed. Note you cannot have a "user station" laptop connect to the mesh router itself wirelessly.
11/17/11: We ordered a pair of Nanobridge 5-25 radios with the large dishes and 1000 feet of the outdoor rated Toughcable Cat 5 and matching grounded connectors.
11/15/11: We have a new working group meeting location (3rd Saturday- 10:30 AM- Macalester Plymouth United Church) and re-flashed 18 Linksys WRT-54GL 1.1 routers with the HSMM-MESH DD-WRT + Mesh.
9/20/11: All the Ubiquiti gear was delivered to Doug N0NAS for the TwinsLAN 2.0 project. We are going to have an interesting Marathon- we will need to run three D-Star uplinks out of the data trailer to three of our repeaters as we have some thin clients down, which provide DNAT.
9/11/11: The remarkable news reports of the F16 pilots who went into the air basically unarmed on 9/11/01 remind us we were unprepared back then but are now. A lot has been accomplished, particularly in the area of national first responder training and interoperability. Interestingly, ham radio was ready for 9/11, in a fairly primitive state, but has not evolved much.
9/10/11: The TWINSLAN 2.0 network project was launched today. With funding from Dan Skripka, we have ordered the 801.11a/n gear. The idea is to establish a area wide mesh backbone running TCP/IP on 5Ghz. Then our various user access points (packet, D-Star etc) can attached to the backbone. Packet is too slow to be an effective choice here. We ordered Ubiquiti Bullet M5HP and Ubiquiti NanoStation M5 NSM5 5GHz 2x2 MIMO units. These will be re-flashed to OpenWRT and mesh. The (HSMM era) debate on encryption has been re-opened- our position - as a long time provider of large scale emergency medical commmunications - routine encryption is not allowed or needed on Part 97.
9/3/2011: Concept of the day: "Mass Calling Event" - we don't have these.
8/15/11: We are staffing up for the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon on Sunday, 10/2/11. There is a volunteer web site, and even a job description for us- way at the bottom- Amateur Radio Communications. There are four teams- 154 volunteer slots- Net 1(Mpls), Net 2 (Mpls/St Paul), Net 3 (St Paul), and Net 4/Data Team (St Paul).
http://volunteers.marathonguide.com/volunteerregistration/twincitiesmarathon.cfm
8/14/2011: The September Emergency Communications issue of QST was underwhelming. I think we have seen enough primitive Go-Kits and the force fitting of proprietary, obsolete technology (Pactor/HF) onto every problem seems contrary to FCC Part 97 where the preamable uses the words "state of the radio art"
8/1/2011: If you have not taken at least the FEMA IS-700a course, now is the time. There are many references to exactly what we are doing here. Marathons, cache radios, span of control and backup radio plans are called out.
7/3/11: We are proud to annouce we have established and tested three large, self managing communications teams in our area who have proven field experience in organizing large public service medical events. We have on purpose stepped out of the hands-on role for several events to encourage new leadership to step up.
6/21/11: The Bakken Radio Club (Anoka, MN) has finished the 2 meter and 1.2 DV/DD additions to their very nice D-Star repeater system. They are trying to get the Trust Server going and are a bit side tracked on an emergency response trailer project so their second site is not on the air yet.
6/20/11: Second hand reports suggest that our enthusiasm for creating formal ICS paperwork may not be fully shared by our served agencies any more. I think we need to be helpful in this work, but in general, if we are helping say a County, none of our folks (ham radio volunteers) would be in the document (like a Form 205) in an official role. So a more "background" rather than "foreground" approach seems best. In our events, we are part of the volunteer event medical staff, and will develop an event medical communications plan (like a draft ICS 202) but will defer to the relevant government agencies in all cases for formal published ICS materials. This is one of our bits of magic we have that no one can take away or match - in a crisis, we (ham operators) will always, in the form of "muscle memory" establish a "net control" and then a formal communications structure in a crisis. This is what Incident Command is trying to do in the last few years, but we have been doing it since the invention of radio.
6/19/11: We heard there was a request to move electronic medical record files by radio during the 2011 Minneapolis tornado response. We are happy to support this, under the following general guidelines:
1. Needs to be a written request from a served agency- back of an envelope is fine.
2. The FCC Part 97 test for crypto use should of course be passed- no other way to move the data, emergency, life and death etc.
3. We would prefer medical records to be encrypted by the served agency as needed and to not ask us to store them - what crypto software to use is a good question - and how distribute keys.
4. If we are running a non-Part 97 network, then #2 can be bypassed.
This is an issue with modern electronic medical records- at our events we use paper charts- which can be slipped under the stretcher strap when you transport a patient - but the world is moving to electronic records. It might be easier to use a USB stick and move the file that way.
6/17/11: We found a bug in the newest AX.25 Linux stack at STPONE and took the packet side back offline. We also rebooted MNSTP, and found out the packet is on COM2 on the Linux box- no big deal.
6/13/11: STPONE is back online. It was the primary power supply- we have had good luck with 11.5 amp open frame switchers we get from Radio City for packet sites, and the SEC-1223 units we put in the D-Star node sites. Packet is also back there, at reduced power.
5/29/11: We got a note from the US Coast Guard Auxiliary. They have people all over the area, providing flood relief lately. For the Red River operation, they are asking about D-Star. Our advice is to get some sites lined up (City water tanks are ideal), and think about putting in packet right away. D-Star repeaters linked to the Trust Servers are a good idea after that. At $3000 each or so, getting a large number of full fledged repeaters plus the Internet needed could be costly. The idea is to get started, and see if a system provides value.
5/24/11: The new to us Neoware CA10 thin clients ($9) are great. They run on 12V at less than 3 amps. The idea is we can load up Slackware, the newest Trivnet database code and the back end to the repeaters (DNAT, mini web site etc.) and the new failover code from Max.
5/20/11: TWINSLAN wants to develop a Part 97 radio microwave linked computer network in our area. One thing to add on is IPV6. D-Star DD Mode, which uses Ethernet only, is for user access from trucks, etc. and should not care about IPV6 vs IPV4. This might be good to test. IPV6 may be more challenging to hack.
5/15/11: Eight Neoware CA10 thin clients ($9 each) have been shipped to us. These are five years newer than the current deployed units and do not have power supplies, which are a suspected failure mode.
5/14/11: Another new, 600 foot repeater site has been made available. One idea is to buy a new D-Star controller ($1400) and use parts we have to develop another site. TWINSLAN needs an R&D site anyhow- as the current repeater fleet (5) were deployed in an operating, high availablity public service network and are not available for hardware development purposes any more. The need for hands-on experimentation at the workbench level is critical now.
5/8/11: We need a work party meeting or two and a site for these. So far, an idea from Max is to develop fail-over on Linux thin clients at our repeater sites. The idea is you have two, and each checks on the other. If one goes down, (stops responding to pings) the other takes over. We have several down right now and need to replace them.
5/7/11: We have a new source of revenue for our operation- rental of our modest fleet of donated surplus laptops. These are not valuable but go to a used children's clothing sale twice a year for a point of sale/barcode application. The idea is we can now finance keeping those machines up to date on batteries and expand the number of laptops slightly. Two go-kits of eight stored in separate locations seems about right. More clubs need to look at a source of income, as donations are not plentiful, as radio group members do not depend on repeaters for routine mobile communications any more.
4/21/11: Dan Skripka has provided 2x $500 Public Health grants for our network. Linking sites, emergency power and newer thin client hardware are on the list. Also a D-Star controller for a repeater for TwinsLAN would be helpful.
4/2/2011: We are getting set for event season. We also need to replace our Linux thin client fleet which are getting old. There are lots of choices. There is a lot of study on linking going on. The 5G Ubiquity gear looks ideal. The 2.4g spectrum, even in rural areas, is getting very congested.
