Have I opened a can of worms here? 
My boys have always used walkie talkies when playing football at the local pitch or heading out on their bicycles. The range has been a few miles and they loved the fact they could have chats with each other too. Far more hardy than a mobile phone. Now one of their friends is at a different school and all boys are using dumbphones this idea of them catching up having a chat or arranging a football date makes so much more sense.
It will be a closed system. I want to see first if it catches on and if the boys make use of it.
Regarding anything commercial - thats way beyond my scope currently. TinCan are looking to expand internationally and if this experiment I hope to setup works at the very least I would want to encourage this form of communication to chat rather than using Instagram or Facebook.
If it were me and if my boys were into gadgetry and tech stuff, I would encourage them to get their amateur radio license. Plenty of kids have gotten them over the years. They can use handheld radios, leverage connecting through repeaters, and learn a lot of great things along the way. My boys liked seeing me with a handheld radio communicate with the ISS, bounce conversations through other satellite repeaters, and even employ LoRAWAN to communicate with our high altitude balloons!
Great idea. I did all that myself back in the 90s - Had a Sigma 4 aerial. Callsign Tintin. Only because my rabbit was called Snowy lol.
With what you have said it looks like it certainly has progressed
Yes, newer advances have really made for a lot of interesting possibilities. Off the shelf without any Internet-related links, between the 70cm and 2m frequencies a 5W handheld radio will get you a couple of miles of signal without a repeater, and with a standard repeater maybe around 50 miles.
Amateur radio isnât a closed system. Itâs generally a condition of the licence that it should be fairly easy for the authorities to monitor the content, which also means that anyone else, can eavesdrop. As this is in a UK context, the licence conditions say âTransmissions between amateur stations are not encrypted for the purpose of obscuring their meaningâ.
Also, there are people who abuse the system, e.g. by jamming repeaters.
There used to be a minimum age of 14, although I think that limit was dropped a long time ago. Whilst grooming might be difficult, because anyone could listen in, users need to be mature enough to cope with abuse, including personal abuse, so Iâd suggest that unsupervised use probably ought to have similar age restrictions to smart phone use.
Tintin isnât a valid amateur radio callsign, so I assume that was CB.
Incidentally, one option for a small island of users, living close together, is to use a DECT system, with no PSTN connection. I think they can typically handle up to 6 handsets. There is encryption, albeit weak by modern standards.
Also, mobile phones have a fixed number dialling feature, although some operators donât enable this. This allows a secondary PIN (PIN2) to be used to set a restricted set of number to be dialled, however it doesnât restrict incoming calls, so may not be closed enough. Emergency calls can still be made
Wow - this has turned in to quite a discussion. I love that there are so many good ideas and passion around the topic. All that from a new userâs post.
Yes, it has. However, if this discussion isnât about providing this solution with FreePBX it needs to be moved to the Off-Topic category and FreePBX tags removed.
It was otherwise why else would I post the question regarding FreePBX
I didnât split it up. I was just saying if the conversation turned away from it it needed to be moved to a proper category. Someone jumped the gun.
If this is on the FreePBX forum because youâre looking to it as an option, using the conference feature could be possible
I think that would be over engineering it, and would be difficult to achieve because different parents would have different rules about who their child could talk to, so, assuming you didnât want a situation where some people couldnât hear specific other people, who could join a conference would depend on who was already there, and therefore on the order of joining.
I think all that was asked for, originally, was simple one to one calls.
Well FreePBX can do that and it can do it securely.
It doesnât support the restrictions on who calls who, and particularly on who one can be called by, or the HCI for parents to configure that. It could be done on Asterisk, but there would be a significant amount of work.
The main security risks would be in the parent control HCI, which is something you would have to write from scratch. This isnât an application where interception of phone to exchange traffic is a big risk factor. Authentication of phones might be of some significance, but the phones are in a poorly controlled environment, even with TLS, FreePBX typically only authenticates phones using SIP credentials, which can be cloned if you have physical access
NB you need to read the original thread, for the full context, and also read up on the Tin Can product.
Itâs not like anyone can just register to the PBX anonymously. This is such a small project it just doesnât need to be fort knox
But reference was made to Tin Can, which isnât a small project.
If you look at my earlier postings, on the original thread, I talk about islands. If you have a single island, which probably is no more than about 10 people, you can have every parent trusting all the other parents and children, and it becomes a simple PAX (private automatic, non-branch, exchange). If you have six or less, in a small geographical area, you might as well just use DECT. There are probably going to be a lot of second hand DECT systems, as the result of home phones going digital.
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