Some questions....
Colin McGregor
crisis zones Linux. A Live Linux CD-ROM with aimed at making the
running of an amateur station in a crisis zone easier. In essence an
updated version of what I wrote about here:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7127 . This just leaves two big
questions :
- What to call this ("ham during crisis" might be mistake for a lunch
menu during a mental breakdown). Something short that clear and short
that says amateur radio in emergency.
- What are the MUST have programs given that I want this to fit on a
700 MB CD-ROM (yes, would love to hope the hardware in a crisis zone
could support better, but a CD means thigs are covered even with old
jusk grade PCs (also, Knoppix for example plays games with compressed
file systems, allowing for a lot more than 700MB of software on a
CD-ROM :-) ))?
The neat thing about the "Poor Man's Packet" project was that it
allowed anyone amateur with a fairly inexpensive modem chip (and a few
other parts), an MS-DOS PC, and a transceiver to start to start into
packet radio. PMP's successor :
http://www.crompton.com/hamradio/mx614_article.pdf can still be done,
but as previously noted, the lack of USB support is a big issue these
days.So, the Arduino with the AVR ATmega328 seem to have become the
low-end development tool set of choice (there are shops in Toronto, ON
that will sell you a new Arduino, in quantity one for under $30
(Cdn.)). We know that the AVR chips can be made to do USB 1.1
more-or-less just thought software
http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/download.html . The quick/easy
solution would be to tie the above two projects together, however in
quantity 1 the AVR Atmega chip (just the chip, not some of the support
parts it needs) can be had for under $5 (Cdn.)... So, a question asked
in ignorance... The ATmega328 has analog to digital circuits built in
... could this chip be used as a 1 chip solution (USB chip and modem)?
Colin.