I went to NEARFest on both days, Friday and Saturday, to demonstrate 4G LTE over ham radio frequencies, under ham radio rules.
On Thursday night the truck suspension snapped, so I didn’t get a chance to do my final dress rehearsal of the demo, and that ended up sinking me for most of the first day.
Then it rained. But it got better.
The short form is that it went great, particularly on Saturday since I had some practice from Friday with explaining the project, the regulatory situation, the current state, and selling the long term dream.
Friday was little rougher - it was raining off and on, I had to relocate due to sun and power availability, my primary and alternate routers for the demo both failed on me - reversibly I expect, but it still burned time especially since I was describing the project and doing all the patter while trying to get the demo up.
Saturday was much simpler - I packed much lighter, had a canopy tent this time, and the demo network came up instantly. I had more people to talk to, and had promised a lot of people a Saturday demo - and delivered.
I didn’t get a chance to sit down or shut up for many hours. For a demonstration about something most would consider well outside the typical idea of amateur radio, that busy-ness is an incredibly strong sign of the curiosity and enthusiasm in the local area, not to mention the many intelligent questions I got.
I felt like I did fairly well in the preparation - getting the idea across to most hams that did software was instantaneous and simple, to hams that did digital modes and had a modern cell phone almost as easy. I did find some gaps in my explanations, better ways of phrasing things for different subgroups, and overall have incorporated those lessons learned for the future. Tallying them all up is surprisingly hard, I think I’ll probably have to record myself giving the spiel a few times and then note down why I say this that way, and that this way, to start to capture that knowledge.
It sounds like we’re going to coordinate a group buy of some band40 eNBs in the local area, get a couple deployments up indoors, and start experimenting with EPC peering. After that, we’ll try and get some outdoor nodes going.
My goal is to get the network side working in a decentralized manner - where Verizon needs cloud services, we can run everything entirely on-site for each site if we were so inclined. I’m hoping to leverage one of the local ham microwave networks here as a backhaul.
There’s a lot we can play with here, and we have a good cadre of people with an extremely wide variety of experience - from current motorola engineer to ex-defense contractor RF lab tech, through professional software developers and infrastructure engineers for major cloud companies. All of them with radio experience and interested in building.
You can not hire a team like this, with this much enthusiasm, for literally any money.
And the nice thing is, it’s too late. They can’t be stopped. I could disappear and the idea will persist and spread, it’s not mine and really never was.
This will not be a radioid.net, or a NEDECN - there will not be a centralized server, and so there will not be centralized power, technological or otherwise, in the project itself.
We can and will experiment, intentionally and unintentionally, with a level of chaos engineering that would drive any infrastructure engineer for a real carrier insane. That’s the ham radio way. We will, by necessity, make things more resilient. The learning is in the doing.
Speaking of resilient - the natural thing to do with these specific eNBs (already running OpenWRT, just old and with a proprietary SDK and baseband stack on top) will be to port them to mainline OpenWRT and then reverse and rewrite all the LTE user space. That will open up these devices to experimentation on-device.
I’m looking forward to it.
I’ll get the v2 spec and get the forgejo deployed with my forked/patched open5gs and other tools (like the esim enrollment portal) this weekend, along with the handouts, signs, and other material.
I’ll see if I can get some more blog posts out of the handouts I did not finish in time, too.
More soon
~Mike