STORM transceiver

STORM transceivers were radio devices developed by Küiser Laboratories, making use of Weather Run technology for ultra-long range communications. The background of their underlying technology in weather control made transmissions especially resilient during storms and other types of inclement weather. Much like scaled-down Weather Run systems, they incorporated a standard-looking resonator antenna array, but required less power so they could be supplied from regular industrial generators.

Küiser never marketed the transceivers as a product, owing to their expense and the classified nature of Weather Run technology. They were primarily used to connect remote Küiser experiment sites to a central communications relay they owned.

Components

Antenna array

Technically just a scaled-down Weather Run resonator that looked like standard radio antennae, the antenna array transmitted and received the signal.

Radio head unit

The radio head unit (RHU) was a piece of equipment used to generate the necessary RF to drive the antenna array resonator, and was placed close to the array for both safety and loss-efficiency reasons. It was controlled entirely by the transmission computer, but had a small local control panel for maintenance purposes.

Transmission computer

The transmission computer (TC) was the “brain” of the STORM transceiver system and acted as the main control unit. It handled data flow control, as well as encoding and decoding, and implemented authentication and encryption up to RAC-II via an onboard encryption module. The system architecture of the transmission computer was quite complex, and included five redundant RISC-V control cores using a “voting” system for fault tolerance, an out-of-band management processor, and a computer driving the graphical user interface, running RealityOS.

For maintenance and emergency access, the transmission computer featured a large touchscreen, which could send text messages, administer cryptographic material and control the RF elements of the system. It also included live graphs displaying data rates, the link quality, and a graphical node-based map of data flows in the network which allowed issues, such as a severed link, to be quickly identified and diagnosed. The computer's hardware also included a phone handset for voice calls and a built-in printer to print out physical messages.

Data feed processor

The data feed processor (DFP) was an optional edge computing system which allowed for low-latency preprocessing, transformation, and compression of data payloads before they went “on the wire”. This was primarily done to reduce bandwidth overhead.

Implementation-wise, the DFP used semi-COTS software running in containers on a custom hardware platform, designed to allow for flexibility and provide future-proofing. It was effectively a ruggedised, radiation-hardened server platform.

In the case of the Island Resurrection Project, the DFP was used to forward data originating from the systems of the Electric Shed, which still ran using ancient pre-2000 protocols designed by Nevrin.

Appearance

The Transmission Computer (TC) had a large touchscreen displaying the main system menu and a graph panel, with a keypad below for text entry / manual communications, as well as various different interfaces and switches, such as the following:

Antenna impedance selector (J6/J15)
Alpha and Beta coaxial test ports; impedance test port for VNA
Volume and gain adjustment keys, transmit key, command key
Combination override / key load port (reverse R symbol) right of keypad
Zeroizer with K1 Kill switch (press to zeroize; when key inserted, initiates 30-second countdown for RAC module self-destruct)
STC handset with coiled cable, attaches to bottom of transmission computer
A/B antenna status lights (top left); alert light (top right); TX light (bottom left)