[FADCA] Use of ESATCOM for TCP/IP

[Doug Christ]

Hello Everyone,

I finally have seen some light at the end of my work tunnel so I figured now would be a good time to start this project. I emailed John Fleming with the State DCA about using ESATCOM to send TCP/IP traffic for the purpose of BBS to BBS forwarding. I have already responded to John that we are only after BBS to BBS forwarding and nothing else. Please, lets do not have different people contacting John. Lets coordinate our efforts and lets see what we can do.

Here is his response.

Doug/KN4YT
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well, let's give it a try and see how it works...we have only a couple of restrictions... 

a:)  whatever is done needs to have statewide applications, not just one portion of the state or one county group involved....we need to see a system diagram and make sure the interfaces are correct and if it works, how we can implement it statewide.. 

b:)  we need to be sure that there is no possibility of streaming or locking up the channel, there is about 127 k outbound and about 250 k inbound, a idle state requires about 7% of that, one voice call in progress will take up another 35% which does not leave much room for another voice call.....of course, proper TCP/IP will wait for the space but we just want to be sure that the channel is capable of doing what we pay it for and that our normal traffic, voice and data, is not sacrificed for some other application.. 

c:)  no video, no priority UTP, no use of ports 7771 or 7777.. 

d:)   if your suggestion includes WinLInk, forget it....we are extremely pleased with SEDAN and think that WinLink is a poor imitation of SEDAN....we are running SEDAN over the link and don't want to sacrifice it at all....I am not convinced that WinLink is an answer, some of the mideast coast guys are pushing WinLink but it so far has shown us nothing, is not proven and is very limited in scope...it relys on HF and if the HF part works, which I don't buy, why do they need a TCP/IP satelitte backbone? the SEDAN thing is rock solid, has absolute state wide coverage and right now is in over half of the EOC-related sites in Florida... 

e:  if it does use too much bandwidth or gives us problems, we'll have to kill it and remember, if we get real busy on a storm (gasp), or a terrorist event (gasp), we have to shut everything else down... 

when you get down to it, give us a call....it's an easy hookup, a little hub on the DIU, assignment of the IP numbers in order and away you go...give us access to the system so we can monitor it..... 

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Orginal Message


John,

Some of us digital communicators in ARES/RACES are wanting to know if we can
use the ESATCOM system for the purpose of BBS to BBS mail forwarding using
TCP/IP. I know that we have talked about this in the past and I finally got
enough irons out of the fire to start on another project.

If this is allowable, I would be very interested in setting up a couple of
BBS's to experiment with. We have several sites where the ESATCOM system and
the BBS are co-located already. In my office, the computers are already on
the same physical network.

Let me know what you think.

Doug Christ, ENP
Communications Technician
E9-1-1 Coordinator
DeSoto County Florida

Phone 863-993-4834
Fax      863-993-4840