Internet and SSB/HAM

[Franklin]

I used to have broadband internet at my house that used radio waves between antennas and transmitters of my house and downtown Houston. The range was 17 miles. Why can't different frequencies be used in the same fashion that SSB and HAM radios can go farther then VHF to provide long range internet without expensive satellites?

 

[Ross]

Ham radio depends upon atmospheric "skip" for long range transmissions. As the ionisphere varies so also does the "skip". Therefore while it can work it may not have the reliability that you may want. You could probably send microbursts when you had a good contact.

 

[Franklin]

I know that the range is not consistant due to how it works but something is better then nothing. For the same reason people buy SSB radios and HAMS to talk. My point is, I think there is room for improvement. After all, you can send and recieve Emails via SSB radios and that's just a bunch of bytes, so that tells me they could do web pages too as that's just a bunch of bytes.

 

[Ross]

It should be posible to make it work at least some of the time. You just need to find a server.

 

[Don S/V ILLusion]

Franklin
The short answer is you can. With a bit of experience on what propagation condition is best for a certain frequency (it varies in effect with frequency), you can have a reasonably dependable internet link. The prerequisite is a ham license and the appropriate modem and radio. You won't obtain the same speed as a hard-wired connection but the process is quite common and reliable, albeit a little more complicated than bears explanation here. If you need more info, send me a private msg and I will refer you to the reference info you would need.

 

[Brian D]

Ham radio will not support the bandwidth required to produce decent internet service. A 128k service requires 192k of bandwidth. Power levels are also inadequate on ham frequencies to support the required Carrier to Noise ratio (C/No) and Energy per Bit over Noise ratio (Eb/No). Plus, one would require the use of dual diversity transmit and receive systems. Just the bandwidth alone will take up most of the ham bands that are available. Now, maybe ham satellite will work better, but still, it is also bandwidth limited.

 

[Bill Roosa]

Hamsat

Unfortunately, ham sats are all in low earth orbit. As such, they all appear to move around a lot and not be above the horizon all the time. They also require some sort of directional antenna to get decent bandwidth. So you are left pointing at an invisible moving object to maintain your link. you normally prepare your packets beforehand and then "burst" them up when the sat is in view. Not very useful for browsing the net. I think that is why most folks take books on long trips away from shore.
I believe the best solution is HAM where you use the HF/SSB links while on the high seas and operate at reduced bandwidth and use either commercial or HAM broadband while near shore. An all band HAM radio can give you access to all those bands (and the marine channels too) in one package.

The other side of this is data compression. There are some technologies on the horizon being developed for the cell phone market that could be applied to HF/SSB to DRASTICALLY reduce the bandwidth taken up by Internet use. 3 meg files shrunk down to 3 k size stuff. This will no doubt be "owned" by someone initially and not available to the public. However the HAM community might backward engineer it just to see how it works and get some ideas of how the concept might be used in other places.