I’m going to do some errands and drive around the triangle and issue shouts again in the next week or so…
I’ve been working with some local hams on using 2m/440 ham frequencies for a network. There is much needed software but we have a community and a few dozen stations. We made our own hardware and we have a text-chatroom web-app. We’re running the network entirely on hobbyist owned equipment - no Internet access and no Internet shortcuts. It’s a kick.
http://ncpacket.net.
I used the mast at FFVC to host a 4-radio network node with two directional antennas and two omni antennas. Some of the links worked in the winter and not so well in the summer. We need more participants to fill in some of the gaps.
If you are in Orange, Durham, or Wake counties, there’s a 50:50 chance it would be easy to get you in. If not, we can still poke at it. The switches are free software on Raspberry PI and the radio interfaces are our own. $9 for PCB and programmed processor, $22 for the rest of the parts from Digikey.