The First Transmission of Live Video via Amateur Radio Broadband in the state of MS

I am happy to report the first transmission of live video via Amateur Radio Broadband in Mississippi


On Saturday, May 3rd, the Scott County ARES Team and the Scott County Amateur Radio Club were the first in the state of Mississippi to transmit live video via Amateur Radio Broadband.


Live color video of the start and finish line of the Morton Day in the Park Bike Race was transmitted over a quarter of a mile away and projected onto a screen at the club’s demonstration booth. Festival goers enjoyed being able to view the race form the convenience of our booth.


The Scott County Amateur Radio Club plans to provide this service to other bike and foot races around the state as a means of keeping our video over amateur radio skills sharp for emcomm purposes. As an EmComm focused club, our primary goal for Live Broadband Video is to be trained, ready, and capable of deploying to emergency and disaster areas for transmitting live video of disaster scenes and staging areas back to viewing screens at Incident Command Posts and Emergency Operations Centers. If a picture is worth a thousand words then live video is worth ten thousand words, especially during an emergency.

In addition to establishing deployable broadband video capabilities, the Scott County ARES Team has established the first official Broadband HamNet in the state of Mississippi. The Scott County Broadband HamNet is a high speed, self discovering, self configuring, fault tolerant, wireless computer network that can run for days from a fully charged car battery, or indefinitely with the addition of a modest solar array or other supplemental power source.


Our focus is on providing emergency communications to our served agencies and team members by linking their computers via amateur radio during emergencies or disasters which knock out normal communications. Every computer connected by amateur radio to our MESH is able to do everything a computer in a standard office computer network can do, except we do it over a very large area: send and receive network wide email, host chat rooms, instant messaging, view and edit network wide web-pages, send forms, documents, photographs and video, share files and peripheral devices, and talk on the phone with each other using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP).


In addition to establishing nodes in Scott County, the Scott County ARES Team has also been establishing linking nodes in other counties in order to create a direct network link from the Scott County Emergency Operations Center (EOC) to the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency’s State Emergency Operations Center (MEMA’s EOC).


The Scott County ARES Team and Scott County Amateur Radio Club owe their success in establishing the Scott County Broadband HamNet to Dr. Frank Howell (K4FMH), Assistant Director of the ARRL Delta Division, for his vision, mentoring, instructing, and donation of equipment. Without Dr. Frank there would be no Scott County Broadband HamNet.

If you would like to have the Scott County ARES Team deploy Live Broadband Video at a race, parade, festival, or other public service event in Mississippi, please contact us. Also contact us you are interested in serving on our Live Broadband Video Team or helping us establish one or more Broadband HamNets in your area of Mississippi.

 

Congratulations, good to see wide band gaining more use as a linking and delivery methodology.
Our club in concert with the San Diego group, CERO, has been doing VOIP, Video delivery, files server access, and private LAN email. Been doing it for over 1 1/2 years now with 40 linked sites and nodes. This includes IRLP and WinLink gateway access for packet stations. While the use of 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz equipment may differ from what you are doing, the concept is the same.

Some links are 12 miles from point to point, and many sites with LAN speeds over 100 MPS. https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/HDRENS/

Show others that with low cost equipment amateurs can keep pace with technology. Our hat is off to you and your group.

Keep up the good work.

Mike xe2/n6kzb

 

Congratulations to you and your Scott County MS Club! Way to lead the way here in the Magnolia State!

73,

Frank
K4FMH

 

I'll say Congratulations as well . Very interesting, we have a group that has a growing area of linked repeaters mainly for ecoms, it would be very interesting to develop this system in North Mississippi, as our group is involved with several ema's and emergency response organizations. I've been personally interested in the mesh networks for awhile now after seeing how widely used they were in Texas.