Mission Critical Push To Talk (MCPTT): what do you know?

[BMDaug]

I'm just thinking that some radios may have ad hoc capability, separate from wifi or LTE functionality. Range would be limited, of course, but for some applications it's a very sensible capability to have. Such as groups of people on some adventure in the great outdoors. Whether for civilian, or military purposes, business, or pleasure. That's actually worthy of being a separate topic entirely.

Cool, but adhoc what? That’s I guess the crux of my question. Adhoc voice communications is what the radio’s main purpose already is. With P25C, I can do individual or group calls with AES on my VHF or UHF itinerant channels.

Are you talking about data like video and images? Text messages? Are you suggesting making two radios Wi-Fi hotspots for personal computers or phones and bridging those connections via RF?

APRS and VARA FM already do this, though not with Wi-Fi as an access point for many devices at once. You can simply interface a radio to a computer and use the Wi-Fi on the computer as the AP for your other devices. People could drop files they want to share into a directory on the radio-interfaced computer, which could queue the files for sending via RF! If I’m starting to understand you, this solution would functionally support what you want to do, but building all of that into the radio would be a major undertaking software wise!

All that said, the XL does allow for GPP software installs, but I’m not sure what the scope of that is. It may open the door to some user defined software to be installed!

-B

 

[ElroyJetson]

Again, that's kind of a separate topic all by itself. But I can envision scenarios where radios that have the ability to create ad hoc networks (using GPS based situational awareness) and using any available communications pathway would be a nice feature to have. Maybe even a life saving one. Imagine how nice it would be for SAR teams to have that functionality when they're outside of any reliable coverage by any trunking or cellular system. As long as the chain of team members all remain within linking range of ANY linked radio, the whole team stays in communication.

 

[BMDaug]

Again, that's kind of a separate topic all by itself. But I can envision scenarios where radios that have the ability to create ad hoc networks (using GPS based situational awareness) and using any available communications pathway would be a nice feature to have. Maybe even a life saving one. Imagine how nice it would be for SAR teams to have that functionality when they're outside of any reliable coverage by any trunking or cellular system. As long as the chain of team members all remain within linking range of ANY linked radio, the whole team stays in communication.

Okay… I’m only expanding on what you already posted here in your thread… What you’re describing is mesh networking! In military radios, this often happens using dual transmitters/receivers so as not to miss potentially bidirectional and overlapping traffic, but there are some cheaper radios that have been discussed in the budget transceivers section (or maybe it was industry discussion?) that claim to do this with Wi-Fi. I tried to find the threads, but couldn’t easily locate them.

Anyway, MCPTT as I understand it, relies on LTE infrastructure, at least for now, though L3H does have some Wi-Fi settings related to MCPTT as well. The standard does define one to one comms, but it does seem like that’s still through a cell site, whether backhauled or isolated. It’s gonna be interesting to see how this develops!!!

-B