Provide reliable and affordable communications in rural and remote places where access to Internet is difficult or non-existent due to isolation or disaster – places generally extremely limited in their back-haul and energy options – as it is too expensive to rent satellite capacity and too slow to install terrestrial links, as well as with regards to access to electricity.

The original system was designed with and implemented in Amazon communities in the Brazilian state of Acre in 2015 as part of the Fonias Juruá project (of which Rafael Diniz is also project lead), which has shown that it is possible to teach local communities to set up HF systems and keep them running for many years.

Creation of a demonstration system in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2018 in the context of Mozilla/NSF Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society (WINS) competition.

We partnered with Abradig and ISA in Terra do Meio, Brazil to install a dozen HERMES systems in 2019.

Contracted by the Nacionalidad Achuar de Ecuador to build and install 8 systems in the Ecuadorian Amazon using our own self-built transceiver in 2022.

Also in 2022, we worked with Associação de Defensa Etnoambiental – Kanindé in Rondônia, Brazil, to install 4 HERMES systems in indigenous territories.

Subsequent deployments have taken place in Bangladesh and Central African Republic.

Community ↔ Community

This is the most basic scenario and is an additional functionality to community-to-community voice communication over HF radio, allowing for digital information to be passed along with real-time voice communication. For added safety, this digital communication can be encrypted.

Some of the options or use-cases for this are:

– Inter-community messaging and file exchange between users. Person A in community A sends a file or a text message to Person B in Community B. This message would be accessed by Person B when they log on to the HERMES system using their device (likely a smartphone). At this point Person B can read the text message directly and/or download the file they were sent.

– Inter-community messaging and file exchange between communities. Person A in community A posts a message to the public bulletin board of Community B allowing anyone in that community to see the message when they log on to the HERMES system with their device (phone, computer). There might need to be editorial input required in order to combat spam or inappropriate/provocative messages. This could be achieved by only allowing the local HERMES operator in community A to actually be the one to post the messages. Or could be done in the receiving community (B) by an administrator who would have to give authorization or permission for the message to be posted to the public.

 

Community ↔ Base

A base in this scenario is the office of an NGO or indigenous nationality in a regional or major city with its own HF radio and HERMES system, allowing for the passing of information between many communities and the base for the purposes of sharing information in both directions. This scenario is quite common and seeks to solve the issue of how information can be passed more easily between communities in critical territories and their counterparts who are part of larger territorial defense, health, monitoring, etc. efforts.

Some use case examples include:

– A community monitoring process that allows multiple communities to send monitoring info (ODK mapping coordinates e.g.) to a base where they can be collated, analyzed and shared with authorities or the general public. These messages can be password protected and encrypted.

– In the other direction, the base can send a broadcast alert of any nature (e.g. COVID response information, proximity of fires, etc.) to all the communities it communicates with. This information can be received in the community and shared amongst the residents.

Community ↔ Base ↔ Internet

A base in this scenario is an HF radio with HERMES in a place where there is Internet access. This could be in a regional city, as above, or another rural community with even basic satellite internet. The base essentially acts as a bridge between a community HERMES installation and the internet, relaying messages. This relay happens without any action required by the base other than the HF radio be switched on and the Internet working properly. This scenario seeks to solve the issue of communication between communities and the “rest of the world”.

– Our main focus for this is an email system that allows for both a traditional email experience using a client (e.g. Thunderbird, K9 for Android, Outlook, etc.) and also a chat interface called DeltaChat that uses email as its backend, but looks and functions like a modern mobile chat app similar to WhatsApp. Each HERMES user will be assigned an email address through which they can send and receive information. Both the client and chat versions allow for encryption. Information will flow from the community to the base via HF/HERMES and then the base will forward that information automatically to the Internet where it will reach a Rhizomatica data center with an email server and then on to the final recipient in the form of an email, chat or SMS.

– A second functionality is in the works that will allow for simple search in which a community user can send a word of phrase that will follow a similar path as above, except to a search engine and the results will be returned as text to the community user. This is similar to early versions of mobile internet search.

Software

The HERMES software is the glue that binds the hardware with the services. We have developed and packaged a complete set of tools and released them together as open-source software, which can be found here.

 

SERVICES

– Email and Chat (global)
– Public messages and secure, password-protected image, voice, text and file exchange between community stations
– Web interface for administration

 

We have also created Mercury, a FOSS software-defined modem solution for the High-Frequency (HF) band. Code available here.

 

Hardware

• Open-source technology
• HF Long Range Radio
• Internet and processing integrated
• Emergency Messages and GPS
• Interactive touch screen
• Wi-Fi connectivity locally