A village radio telecommunications system in Sierra Leone

The networks envisaged would consist of a number of village stations within range of a base station. Each station would consist of a transceiver powered by a solar panel with a lead acid battery to act as a reservoir. The antennae would be simple omnidirectional antennae. The stations are controlled by microprocessor based control units performing the functions of selectively calling other stations, controlling, monitoring and logging battery charging, maintaining a log of station use, measuring output power, VSWR, and signal strengths and of transmitting this information to another station, normally the base. This facilitates remote fault diagnosis and detection of operator misuse, as well as enabling statistics on the use of the network for future planning