The Karuk, Yurok, and Hoopa Valley Tribes – all of whom lack sufficient access to digital communications – are all working together to create a comprehensive communications strategy that includes both WiFi and amateur radio. In addition to creating community-owned infrastructure for each First Nation, the strategy is for each tribe to support one another as fallback in the event of an outage.

The Karuk were the first of these tribes to receive a grant from ARDC. Building on that, ARDC has provided grants to the Yurok and Hoopa Valley Tribes, which cover the following:

• Wireless Engineering & Installation (Hoopa Valley)
• Wautec Tower: WiFi, Licensed Microwave, EBS & Amateur Radio Gear Installation (Yurok)
• Amateur Radio Hardware Installation
• Amateur Radio Promotion & Training
• IT Technical Training
• Case Study

These communities are already doing tremendous work to develop their own digital communications and amateur radio infrastructure despite countless hurdles, and these grants are designed to help fill some critical gaps. The case studies they produce may help countless other rural deployments, particularly deployments on First Nations lands.

Update: You can now read the completed case study from the Hoopa Valley Tribe and the completed case study from the Yurok Tribe.