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Captain's log, stardate <- 1565561012.767 ->

The 0G launch in pt_BR last weekend was quite well received, much interest expressed throughout the rest of the conference. It's quite nice when even the session photographer and a hotel waiter express interest in the project ;-)

The night before the conference, the notion came up of a long-range radio, operating at 27MHz for low-bandwidth, high-power and very long-range (up to 500km, good for a sparse community, for getting stranded on the road and reaching your other device back home to ask for help, etc) communication, possibly negotiating alternate frequencies for faster but shorter-range communication. It feels pretty much essential to me now, but it's likely to take some time for our (GNU) radio expert to develop, so a Caninos Loucos first batch is absolutely unlikely to have them. Prof Zufo tells me LoRaWAN is something they have in one of their options of boards, but I'm told that's proprietary to the core.

Some concerns about the power use of such low-frequency radios were raised; if we were aiming at truly embedded processors and operating systems, such as FreeRTOS or eCos on AVR, to get weeks or months of battery life, they'd be more worrying, but my goal is to run GNU, which likely means a full-fledged MMU-capable CPU, so I guess less-than-weeks of battery life will have to be tolerated ;-)

There seem to be higher frequencies than 27MHz available for our kind of use world-wide, but given the shorter ranges that seldom span different jurisdictions, the exact available frequencies might vary.

Designing radios that could work at multiple such frequencies, especially ones that could always listen at 27MHz for others' hails, appears to be quite a challenge. Maybe it would make sense to have separate radios to operate at different frequencies, but that could get expensive. Wing development might involve a wien bridge for such a wide range of frequencies... Plenty of conversation about that going way over my head; mentions of hackrf and rad1o.

Still no response from Puri.sm, but I got an email from someone (at or close to?) Pine64 about running 0G on Pinephones. The rtl8723bs WiFi might make it a challenge to realize the vision of a blob-free system, but it would be nice to bootstrap/grow the network with such devices, and getting a modern phone-oriented GNU system to adapt to 0G would certainly be welcome. Plus, if this WiFi chipset is widely deployed and has an expected lifetime longer than usual, it might make sense to undertake the effort of at least trying to develop Free firmware for it.

So blong...