// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
This Digital Radio Gets Messages to the World’s Remotest Locations
It sends encrypted signals with no satellites or relay towers required
Margo Anderson is senior associate editor and telecommunications editor at IEEE Spectrum.
Peter Bloom founded a nonprofit that provides remote communities with shortwave radios that have much better digital data rates than other options.
Shortwave radios offer a way to connect one location on Earth to practically anywhere else with minimal infrastructure. But these radios come with some drawbacks—a significant one being that, unlike satellite communications, their transmission rates for digital data are typically measured in just hundreds of bits per second.
Peter Bloom is the founder of Rhizomatica, a nonprofit that works with remote, indigenous, and off-grid communities around the world to build shortwave and cellular-communication infrastructure.
Peter Bloom is the founder of Rhizomatica, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that has open-sourced a digital shortwave-radio set called the High-frequency Emergency and Rural Multimedia Exchange System, or HERMES. The set operates in the high-frequency (HF) band from 3 to 30 megahertz, as does Mercury, its digital modem. Rhizomatica staff travel around the globe to remote locations in countries like Bangladesh, Brazil, and Ecuador. Wherever they go, they use HERMES to help connect locals to the rest of the world.
Bloom spoke with IEEE Spectrum about how HERMES brings better data rates and encryption to shortwave radios.
Peter Bloom: We use the ionosphere as our satellite—or mirror—which helps us move information, voice, and data over really long distances. We’re using small radios that put out about 20 watts of power, and we can pretty reliably do 400- to 600-kilometer links between two radios. We’re talking about places that are not easy to reach, where it’s not simple to put terrestrial infrastructure.
What can HERMES send that a basic voice radio can’t?
Bloom: HERMES is a software stack—it’s a set of different programs that all work together in order to be able to send data over HF. HERMES allows you to send pretty much any file. Depending on what the file is, whether it’s a photo or an email or a voice memo, it just sends it as a file. It’s like a data pipeline over HF.