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by armagon 1243 days ago
Take a look at AREDN, the Amateur Radio Emergency Digital Network -- https://www.arednmesh.org. They use commercial WiFi gear (see https://www.arednmesh.org/content/supported-platform-matrix) with custom firmware, running on the adjacent ham radio bands (which have less noise on them, allowing for greater distance, although I wouldn't be surprised if the WiFi bands and radio bands have different allocations in Europe.) Surprisingly (to me, anyway) they say that 'N' speed WiFi works better at long ranges than newer protocols.

Honestly, as you are in Europe, you should look into the European Hamnet. See https://hamnet.eu/site/community.html and https://www.tapr.org/pdf/DCC2014-TheEuropeanHAMNET-DG8NGN.pd.... They aren't using WiFi, but the goal is the same.

Both of these require licensed amateur radio operators to use normally. (Maybe wartime is a different matter). I do believe I heard that Russia took radio transceivers away from operators in the Ukraine, but don't know much about it.
2 comments
mzerod 1242 days ago
My time to shine- this is for anyone concerned about ham operation in Ukraine

https://eindhoven.space/2022/10/08/ham-radio-usage-in-ukrain...

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livueta 1242 days ago
Just as a note: you can easily configure AREDN to not use non-ISM channels.

Regarding custom firmware: yeah, but it's really openwrt with some CGI scripts. If you're not trying to specifically join their preexisting networks, you can accomplish everything it does off of vanilla openwrt with not much effort. I think understanding what's actually going on under the hood in networking terms is valuable enough to skip the preconfiguration, though I guess that depends on the exact deployment case. If this isn't intended to be used militarily in any way and is just putting up infra in rear areas, maybe that doesn't matter.

This post ended up a bit more negative than I intended, so I should say that I have successfully used AREDN (or similarly configured openwrt) on Ubiquiti APs with yagis to do more or less what the OP is asking for, and it works pretty well. This is overall a good suggestion.

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