Another weekend, another public service event. Being a member of AUXCOMM comes with the responsibility to aid in communications where needed. While not as important as in a disaster zone, communicating for public service events like the New River Trail Races, gives us an opportunity to test equipment and practice passing traffic.
As part of my local AUXCOMM group, I find myself helping out with public service events pretty often. As a mater of fact, April is our busiest month and we support between 8 and 10 events a year. For the last several years, one of those events has been the Appalachian Journey Bike Ride in Floyd County.
Some of the cooler technology making gains these days is raining down from above. With the onslaught of LEO communication satellites being launched, connectivity is everywhere and it's getting easier and cheaper to obtain. Through a deal between T-Mobile and Starlink, you can now experience satellite connectivity provided directly to your cellphone.
My AUXCOMM group has been playing around with the idea of using Meshtastic to supplement our resource tracking. At net control we normally use Windows computers and found the mapping capability of the Meshtastic web client to be a bit lacking. I decided to try and roll my own to give us nicer looking maps with offline capabilities and a way to track resources around the map in near real time. Here's what I came up with!
I was recently supporting a bike ride event called the Appalachian Journey. I was assigned to help out in the communications trailer as net control. It's always nice to have internet access for information. When Randy, KE4RL, built his communications trailer, he designed it to be a Faraday cage so it's impossible to receive a wifi or cellular signal inside. This gave me an opportunity to see if my old trusty Linksys 54G Router was still useful.
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| Comm. Trailer with Linksys sitting on top. |
