A special Team called HIT (Humanitarian Intervention Team) was created a few years ago by the Luxembourgish Government. The members of the HIT are sent abroad in areas where a natural disaster occurred to help with their expertise. One footprint of HIT is establishing communication via Satellite.
I’m trained in the area of Flood Rescue and Rescue Diver. So basically I'm sent out when there is an intervention in with water. During an intervention, communication between the members is very important. On an international intervention, parts of the countries communication systems were inactive due to the heavy rainfall. So we had no possibility to communicate with the teams in the field.
During this mission, I started to think of a solution. It should be a quickly deployable system which allows us to communicate on a long range. Exchanging with my teammates, I quickly gathered the following set of requirements which the system had to meet:
- Communication range more than 2 km
- No Line of Sight
- Easy to setup
- Send GPS coordinates
- Central management interface
- Adaptable Frequencies for the Radiotelephone
- Scalable
- Inexpensive
- Portable
- Easy to Transport
My first shot was to use Wifi as a medium to transmit data. Unfortunately, the range of the standard Wifi modules does not reach more than 1 km without LoS (Line of Sight).