Outernet?

[Ubiety]

Has anybody played with outernet while/for overlanding? I am thinking that APRS + outernet = poor man's satcom. If you have thoughts please share them with me!

The outernet is a 1 way (receive only) sub-section of the internet beamed out by Outernet on Inmarsat GEO sats in the L band (worldwide coverage). Outernet hardware (all you need to get started) can be had for less than $100 - this allows you to receive and decode Outernet data - which is typically news/educational/etc. - curated with the developing world in mind.

It is possible to route messages from the APRS network to the outernet network - so a properly formatted message from home could end up on your outernet hardware in the wild. It gets even more interesting when you consider that it is possible to have APRS messages repeated by satellites (ISS, etc.) and gated to the internet (and make it home).

I have all the hardware and will be be giving it a whirl on our sojourn to MT in Sept. I am really interested in hearing anybody's thoughts/advice on any of this. ISS location prediction is simple with a phone/tablet app and from home I have been able to bounce APRS packets off of it and have them gated to the internet.

PSA: Of course APRS TX on commonly accepted frequencies is for licensed radio operators only - so go get your ticket, it is super easy to pass and might just be a lot of fun for you :)

Given the right sprinkling of unicorn dust this could just work!

 

[Prerunner1982]

Interesting. Keep us updated on your findings.

 

[Ubiety]

Quick update. I am unable to RX outernet at our home due to tree blockage but had some great luck with it in a window and my folk's house. The antenna provides a large enough lobe to easily grab onto the sat signal with a pretty good margin for error in pointing. I have RX'ed news, WX data, Wikipedia articles and most importantly some amateur radio / APRS data. I am committing myself to read Bob Bruninga's treatise on outernet+APRS but the following seems to be true

• (some at least) APRS packets repeated via ISS or PCSAT(s) will be automagically gated to outernet (very convenient!)
  
• (some at least) Terrestrial APRS packets gated from RF domain which contain OUTNET will be re-gated to outnet (mouthful)

Pretty good writeup of APRS + outnet

 

[brien]

Subscribing as a reminder to fiddle with this. Thanks for the information, and i'm looking forward to seeing how this evolves

 

[Ubiety]

I had some success today - I was able to get some APRS messages (from the JKU) gated from RF to the internet and then routed through to the outernet. I left the dream catcher (outernet receiver) running all day at my folk's house and when I returned there this evening it had copies of my APRS messages in its file system. The data is stuck away in text files and the presentation is not nice but the dream catcher runs an ssh server and has some *nix tools on board...

A few things I learned

• I can get APRS msgs onto outernet with the correct path, etc. Not all of them and those that do make it are often in duplicate.
• APRS packets that are digipeated off of sats seem to be automatically included in outernet data. This is great as one could imagine bouncing a packet off of ISS or PCSat from the middle of nowhere and having it show up automagically on outernet (would at least be confirmation you were gated/digipeated)
• I saw some Twitter messages show up on the dream catcher's filesystem but they dissapeared before I had a chance to examine them carefully. I noticed they all had #outernet and #request. Dunno not much of a tweeterer - but may have found a use for it :) I fired up the tweeterer and sent a message to outernet, it has not showed up yet on the dream catcher.

Next steps

• Bounce a packet off of ISS which has no outernet routing and verify that it still shows up on outernet. Have only done this from base station at home, will try from there as well as from JKU. This will be addressed to EMAIL as that is what I will use from the wild...
• Learn a little more about Twitter messages on outernet.
• Dream catcher software comes in a couple different flavors, one a more full feature linux distro than the other. Maybe move to the more full distro version?
• Figure out how I could get this to work for my wife :) Hahahaha!

Happy weekend!

 

[Ubiety]

Dream Catcher

 

[Ubiety]

Configured the radio in the JKU for APRS sats and had two APRS packets digi-peated by ISS this morning - dumb luck :)
I was able to confirm that APRS packets bounced off of ISS will be automagically routed to outernet!
That is a two satellite hop from the JKU to the dream catcher!

An APRS packet routed to outernet from terrestrial APRS RF network. Note the end - msg is sent to APOUT and contains the word OUTNET in the payload

CALLSIGN>APK101,WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1,qAo,WA7NWP-6::APOUT :OUTNET CALLSIGN 7/14/17 2:15pm{8

Two APRS packets bounced off of ISS - which contained no outernet routing data - made it to outernet just the same. :) Very very good as this serves as confirmation that our message is in the system. RS0ISS* means that we were repeated by ISS.

CALLSIGN>4W3WYS,RS0ISS*,qAR,VA7PF-1:'2-Gl dK]"4P}
CALLSIGN>4W3WYS,RS0ISS*,qAR,K7YNX-5:'2-Gl dK]"4S}my_message

Given this I can get a small msg into my wife's email inbox. Now, how to make it easy enough for my non-geek wife to respond from home --> outernet. :)

Woot! While somewhat eccentric this may just be viable! And no service contracts :)

 

[Ubiety]

Ok, it is easy enough to get APRS data onto outernet over TCP connection to the APRS-IS network (wife scenario). I found a couple of ways to accomplish this and am glad to report the spoofy method is not required ;) I wrote a few lines of python to log into APRS-IS and inject packets - these packets were then routed to outernet within an hour (yes APRS data seems to be updated hourly!!!).

I was able to inject a "spoofed" packet which indicated it was relayed via ISS and that packet was routed to outernet. Neat, but I don't want to publish or rely on this.

I also found I had misspoke earlier. A message sent to APOUT containing the text OUTNET will be relayed to outernet regardless of whether it was gated from RF or TCP domain. So this will be my method of choice - I can wrap this bit of code in UI that my wife could use to send me messages from the computer - likely would throw in retries.

I think I have shown this is viable. Its time to start working on an enclosure for the dream catcher, something easy and protective. Maybe a small pelican case.

I am not having APRS email messages arrive in my inbox. More research...

 

[Prerunner1982]

Good stuff, thanks Greg.

 

[Ubiety]

Update - the family is coming home from their vacation to the in-laws today so the dog and I moved back home from my folk's. This means that my outernet connection is down as we have a solid wall of trees between us and the satellite :( Before we packed up I was able to get a C# Windows app written that can send messages to the outernet. If you are a ham and interested let me know.

I need to build an enclosure for the dream catcher but I think I know what I need to know to give it a whirl from MT in Sept.