fortunately the ice did not make it to my area, however i received 10 inches of snow. I too keep flashlights, batteries, fuel, food and medical supplies handy. one under looked area in at home disaster planing is communications.
I am a ham, and have a few hand-helds for these situations. however the closest repeater won't key up with out at least 20 watts. both my base station and my VoIP are dependent on the grid. fortunately the lines from the main road are buried and outages are rare where i live. however the closing of Vermont Yankee. has me wondering if i will need a reliable backup for my radio, VoIP, modem and server and switch. The problem i seem to be encountering, is that i can't run a generator or have large batteries inside the building because of restrictions imposed by my fascist landlords.
I have considered getting a ups, however most units will only allow me to keep power for about 20 minutes. what i should do is create an Ethernet switch that will bypass the server for only the VoIP and let everything else power-down.
a few pics and mild commentary [attachment=2] Our fearless leader interviewing at Hack Manhattan Hackerspace [attachment=1] Makerbot Replicator 2 at Makerbot store [attachment=0] Lunch for 22
All of the talk about SOPA and PIPA, and the voluntary censoring of websites has forced us into thinking about how these pieces of legislation would affect us. because the internet has no boundary it would effect all of us.
what are your thoughts about this, and how will sopa and pipa effect the open hardware community?
especially a portable unit, using a gumstix overeo and fpga it could be done but will be costly. gnu radio is a great software package.
if a second 24bit audio codec can be attached to the gumstix without to much trouble, it would reduce the need for a larger fpga or even possibly just the si570 and an cpld.
i have a few eagle files for layout purposes it should work well, there are some single chip I/Q demodulators that would work well.
