Been talking to Timberwolf22 via PM and in his S-250 thread, though some of the info I was going to put in a reply PM would be interesting to more people - so...
Timberwolf22 said:
...Now the shelter build... If you can make the camper S250 work = more power to you. I could not make the camper S280 + HAM shack work, and my S280 in my M35a3 is 2-3 times the size of my S250. I just had too much other stuff going into the camper so I pulled the comm gear and gave it the dedicated S250 shack...
I'm trying to make the comms stuff a secondary function of the shelter - thinking the phrase "Jack of all trades and master of none". Like an expedition truck, I wanted a "module" to slide in and give me advanced camping abilities, this meant food refrigeration, sleeping and a place to, um... go
. Using the
XM1027 as the host for this module, I wanted it to at least be able to accommodate the maximum personnel I could carry in the cab, while sleeping (so 5 persons). To do this it needs to sleep two inside, and three on the roof - plenty of space for that, but need to build a tent for the roof to sleep three up there out of the sun, rain, or snow. The idea here is that if the needs for personnel are larger than what the XM1027 can carry, I'd probably have another vehicle to do that, and much more space would be required to accommodate those additional people. That's where
FOBIC comes in, add a decked-out trailer to the XM1027 and now we can have a very comfortable capacity for 16 or more persons, and a lot more sheltered space to work with that we can compartmentalize for different tasks and functions. Bonus design for the FOBIC's trailer, is that it's intended to intake the S-250 from the XM1027, and allow for self sustained camp operations for at least 24 hours without external power - freeing the XM1027 for other tasks if need be. If I go bigger than that - well that's what my bus project is supposed to be for - think of it like my interpretation of an S-280 in a M35...
![[thumbzup]](https://www.steelsoldiers.com/images/smilies/icon_smile_thumzup.gif "Thumbs Up [thumbzup]")
Evolutionary camp stages by personnel capacity:
Back-pack on foot or just XM1027 (1-2 persons, "recon/sentry")
S-250 + XM1027 (1-5 persons, "fireteam")
FOBIC + S-250 + XM1027 (and vehicles by others: 2-16 persons, "squad")
Bus + FOBIC + S-250 + XM1027 (and many vehicles by others: 30+ persons, "platoon")
Much like the scale of the Fireteam, Squad, and Platoon you see in the military - the capabilities of these setups are expected to increase with the size and personnel availability.
Timberwolf22 said:
I already ran out of room again in my 19" rack...... but I have space to mount a second so that's going to be an expansion - on top of the refrigerator...
Running Asterisk on a ToughBook lets me run a full PBX/Router with 24-downstream 8+16-upstream PTSN/T1, and lets me tie (a) radio(s) into the system. All of the phone system
fits in 2U. With Asterisk dial-plan control switches I can remote the whole operator console to another area, like the
FOBIC setup (which is the idea) for more hands on deck and more space. All of the radios and RF kit is going to be SDR (both RX and TX) with the exception of some specific compact commercial gear - I'm working on some interesting RX equipment from scratch and using multi-GPU accelerator post-processing on the signal, should let me do powerful things, and gain vast insights to the RF space I set up in. All of the RF will fit in another 2U.
When my home network overflowed a 24U rack and started costing me $500/month to run, it gave me a reality check. With careful design and planning (lots of virtualization), I have actually increased my home network capabilities and security, and whittled it down to 9U comprised of a 1U 48-port 1Gbe PoE switch (Layer-3 managed, 10Gbe uplink), a 2U UPS for the network and servers, and two server cases (4U and 2U). Now I'm less than $75/month to run it, and I use a smaller 14U rack that also holds
some equipment for my workstation and another 2U UPS for that.
