Would a Holochain hApp have the ability to send and receive signals between two Ham radios?
In 2020 I read an article that was not from Holochain or Holo that stated the following.
“Holochain is also protocol agnostic, this means that devices can talk to each other and share information via Bluetooth, Ham radio, Cellular etc, so if one branch still has internet and the others don’t it can actually still send and update that data to other branch’s without relying on the internet.”
I am interested in how the protocol would work—communicating from one computer to the Ham radio, then back to a computer on the receiving side of the Ham radio signal. Is this possible now or in the future? If so, is there any documentation to read on this topic?
My focus is on helping create a mesh network with parallel ways to communicate, and I feel this would be one additional option.
Packet Ham Radio for digital transmission has been around since 1970s or 80s. Wikipedia article Complete.org has a pretty thorough article about Packet Radio technology and even a page specifically about the Packet Radio features built into Linux
Given that Linux already has a Packet Radio stack built in, a Holochain hApp could run inside of a container (Docker, etc) on a Linux box (can anyone say Packet HoloPort).
If you wanted to implement it, I’d be willing to bet that you would find Holochain knowledgeable people willing to help.
Thank you so much, This is exactly what I am looking for. I am grateful for You and your help. I feel silly not doing enough research to find this myself.
You are welcome @Uptime ! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do a little research myself. I’ve been curious about the same thing. I had no idea that Linux had built in support for Packet Radio until last night when I had to look it up because I wanted to answer your question.
In the days before google, we used to have conversations and ask questions of each other to learn things from each other. Now we can sit at our computers and be isolated, disconnected and have all the answers. Perhaps some sort of balance between the two is possible.
This is exciting! I don’t know much about HAM, but it appears you can run TCP/IP over packet radio (did a quick web search for “TCP/IP packet radio linux”). That’s really all that’s needed for Holochain. While it’s true to say that Holochain is protocol-agnostic – all you need is the ability to transfer data between one peer and another – it’s also true to say that you’re gonna have a long, hard road ahead of you if you decide to run it on a phyisical layer that doesn’t have TCP/IP support! (That is, you’ll have to write your own networking component.)
