The IP 400 project has been referred to as ‘the Packet Radio of the 21st Century’, which is the primary vision, and the motivation is to bring a higher speed data mode to the 400MHz band that will create a data transport for modern-day data streams from digital radios such as DMR, D-Star, P25 and M17 to name a few.
The starting point is to use off the shelf devices, designed for commercial use, which are capable of transmitting in the 400 MHz band. Around these a simple node has been created that can send and receive a data frame using 4FSK at speeds from 100 up to 200Kilo bits/second, in 100KHz bandwidth. This is fast enough for most data traffic, and will be known as the ‘primary mode’ of transmission. To live within the restrictions placed on data rates by some countries, the 100Kb/s mode will be used for initial contacts.
Primary Mode
The goal of the primary mode is to be able to establish a local mesh network and routing information. There are two components, hardware and software. The hardware is built around an STM32WL33 processor, which has an ARM Cortex processor and a built-in IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver that can work on the 400MHz band. The hardware is realized as a Pi HAT in the Pi Zero form factor, and contains firmware to create a local mesh network, and send and receive frames from the raspberry Pi. This hardware is known as the ‘mini node’.
The mesh network is built by periodically sending a ‘beacon’ frame periodically, which has data about the node such as its callsign, IP address, and location information. The location data can be static or derived from an attached GPS receiver.
The name was chose to represent an ‘Intelligent Protocol’, which can dynamically change formats and data rates as needed.
Secondary Mode
The secondary mode will be to implement a higher speed modem that uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) to create data rates that are higher than 1Mb/s. It will be capable of operating in the 400MHz band, however due to licensing restrictions in some countries, the 2.95GHz band will be offered as an alternative. This allocation is available around the world, and can be used for backbone or trunking systems, and high speed data links between repeater systems. As it is an amateur transceiver, it will not be limited to power levels that are employed in its commercial counterparts.
Software
All software generated by the project is open source, it can be found on the primary GitHub repository, a link to it can be found on the Links page. It is our goal to ensure that this remains open to encourage experimentation and development activities in the amateur community. Please join the developer group if you have something that you would like to contribute.
Hardware
The Alberta societies act, which is our governing legislation, prohibits the society from engaging in any kind of trade activities. This presents a problem with the hardware, which has to be designed, manufactured and distributed to interested parties. As we cannot do this directly, we have engaged commercial partners who will look after that aspect of the project for us, and have the requisite expertise. If you place an order on this site, it is forwarded to a partner for fulfillment. Revenue generated by commercial partners is donated back to the society.
Having a common hardware platform is paramount to the success of the project, and also enables us to provide support, as debugging software on a common platform is a relatively straightforward exercise. We do not have the time or resources to debug or support our software on hardware generated by others, not to mention that building hardware is also a complex and expensive proposition, involving knowledge in circuit design, PCB layout and manufacturing. We are leaving that to the professionals.
As the project progresses, the PCB component will become more complex and required specialized equipment to manufacture. Establishing these relationships now will ensure our continued success. After all, where did you get the rig you have now?