AREDN - Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network

The other day on mastodon.radio, I saw a post about AREDN, or the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network. I had heard of it before, but never really looked into it, and to be honest, still haven’t really look into it too deeply, but it looked like something I’d be interested in. After a quick poke around on the AREDN website, I hopped on eBay and bought two hAP ac lites (the first device listed on the supported devices list).

I flashed the AREDN firmware on both of them and set them up on two different networks. One I have set up as a node on my AMPRnet block. The other I have on a separate VLAN in my house.

Even though they are both on separate networks, they can see each other over the wireless mesh connection.

There are many nodes across the world, but unfortunately, there are none anywhere near me. I am a lonely node on the map below, but there are tunneling capabilities to allow ip tunneling over the internet to connect with other nodes. I may look into that in the future. I’m still not sure what I’ll do with these nodes, but radio and internet stuff together is my wheelhouse, so I’m sure I come up with something fun.

P.S. - I’m not sure why I’m blurring this stuff out. I seriously doubt anyone cares, but better safe than sorry.