What's Next

The station can talk now, in more ways than most: analog and digital voice, two mesh networks, packet, email over radio, and it reaches the field over the internet when the RF runs out. That was the goal set back in the first chapter, and it is met.

The open thread is the opposite of everything so far. Everything to this point was about getting the station to talk. The next build is about teaching it to listen.

Software-defined radio, used not as a toy but as a dedicated listening layer that feeds what already exists: an activity map so you stop scrolling the bands, transcription of what the station hears, keyword alerts pushed out over the mesh, and propagation measured by your own antenna instead of a forecast built from other people’s reports. The plan, written before the build, is here: SDR as the Station’s Ears.

This is where the series catches up to the present. The bench is never really finished, so new chapters land as the build moves.

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