On 1/15/10 11:52 AM, Bill Woodcock wrote:

On Fri, 15 Jan 2010, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote: > After the Katrina landfall a diverse group of wireless

people started

> organizing a relief effort...

There are quite a lot of us working on it, is there something specific you're volunteering to do?

-Bill

Thank you Bill, As I'm in Geneva this morning so the only thing I can share that is immediately accessible is the experience of living for four of the past five years off-grid. My best generator was the Honda 2000 watt, 120V, super quiet, 15 hours/gal unit. My second best was the (PRC knock-off) Pony 1000 Watt 120V super quiet. Everything begins at the generator. Gas is useful. For batteries a series of 6V AGM. A single 6V AGM can power a VSAT (HughesNet) for several hours. With three and even a 1000 watt 120V genset a VSAT link can be kept up a large part of 24/7. They are heavy and never pre-positioned (gensets aren't either), but they are the stable, long-term uptime must have. An efficient pure-sine wave inverter completes the electrical basic of a mobile programmer's electrical infrastructure. Non-pure-sine eats voltage and phase delta sensitive gear. Learning about Electrical Cost of Link Characteristics (ECLC, a low energy pun on the PILC WG abbreviation) was the most important thing I learned going off-grid. Some of these points are made within the larger ICT donor framework, at http://www.inveneo.org/download/Inveneo_ICT-Sustainability_Primer0809.pdf , the Inveneo ICT Sustainability Primer, which is worth the read (particularly on why "donated kit" and Windoz are wicked expensive to field), see pages 2 and 3. Things overlooked in the Inveneo paper is the role of portable generators, 6V battery management, and VSAT, which are what I see as the "off-grid" critical toolkit. I had educational and medical requirements in addition to my always-connected-to-my-racks-in-Maine needs. I'm wicked pleased to see the NSRC kit in route, and as I'm in Geneva I'll start on our IRC PoC and our own donor commit. When I get back to Cornell I'll start there too, as I know there is an interest at Cornell Law in the Maison des Infants de Dieu orphanage in Port au Prince. Eric