We now have a functioning four node AREDN mesh network in Salem, Oregon.
We added a Rocket M5 120 19 dBi sector to our repeater tower at
1800 feet which ties into another opposing Rocket M5 sector, a PowerBeam M5 300
and a Rocket M5 Omni 13. 3 nodes have NetGear GS108E VLan switches and WLAN connections. See AREDN map.
We have a Citadel BBS/email service running on a Raspberry Pi 2B for Mesh use.
All nodes are running iperfspeed as we test throughput, adjust aim, and find new station locations
At 22 miles we get 2.5- 3 Mbps on iperfspeed.
Salem is very challenging terrain due to heavy tree cover. Our neighbor city, Keizer has a lower elevation and many trees, and cannot connect at this time.
Most neighborhoods have fir trees 60 to 100+ feet tall in their yards!
We have been frustrated trying to connect neighboring hams with existing towers and masts. Trees prevent 5.8 GHz
connections beyond 400 meters. We have two neighboring hams on a 2.4 GHz link at 1 km, with about 6-8 SNR.
They cannot reach our 5.8 mesh from their homes until others are added or a mobile link is placed.
We are now using NanoStation NSM5 on mobile hitch mounted masts to survey coverage areas.
We run WiFi scan and drive to find the green mesh connections. Streets adjacent to fields or open parks work best.
So we are recommending new Salemmeshnetwork hams purchase NSM5 units for mobile or portable use with a power inverter. These actually work on the dashboard of the car at moderate range. (Everyone still wants to know what to buy to use at their house.)
We have a newsgroup and are sharing information on salemmeshnetwork@groups.io
We have a weekly talk net on mesh networking on our WA7ABU repeater, 145.290 Thursdays at 1900. EchoLink access is also available, search for WA7ABU-R
I am confident at this early stage we can deploy to key locations such as our hospital and EOC with mobile NSM5 stations and transfer large files
and forms with high speed. A 6 MB PDF file usually takes under 30 secs even at our marginal 11-13 dB SNR links.
We have discovered an important rule:
“It is far easier to find a signal and park than to park and find a signal.”
A similar rule is don’t mount a mast until you have a signal. This is not VHF.
If you are in the mid-Willamette valley we are looking for users and locations with LOS to Salem
and the surrounding hills. Please join us for testing on Ch 177 10 MHz
-Brett
KG7GDB, CN84
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Mesh success in Salem, OR
Sat, 08/31/2019 - 13:52
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Mesh success in Salem, OR
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For path studies, I use a technique I learned from a county agency: I keep an NSM3 with a portable AC inverter and Li-ion battery pack handy to do quick path checks.
What uses do you have in mind for your AREDN system? I'm in the middle of deploying VoIP telephones to our EOC's with voice and dial-up fax support. All of our EOC's have analog POTS telephones as part of their inventory, so plugging one of them into an analog telephone adapter (ATA) on AREDN is an easy way to give EOC staff a familiar communications resource to contact other agencies and EOC's. Faxing is for those occasions when someone brings in a piece of paper and wants to quickly send it to a remote recipient. Fax on VoIP ATA's takes a bit of tweaking, which is what we're in the middle of working out.
73's,
Collier
NM7B
Hi Collier,
Our AREDN system has been growing as an independent emergency high speed network which can be used for ARES/Auxcomm/CERT communications.
So far we are funded by independent hams contributing much field time and personal equipment to the cause. We have received no grants from our served agencies or community yet. There has been lots of interest in our area from Hams, ARES and CERT members.
As a proof of concept, we were able deploy a battery powered mobile-based PowerBeam M5, NSM5 and Mikrotik hAP ac Lite at our Marion County ARES meeting last Monday and connect all meeting attendees with WiFi devices to our mesh. The whole process took about 1 hour.
Our goal is to connect all interested Oregon AREDN mesh users through the Willamette Valley through RF mesh. We have many potential users within the 11 counties served by the 145.290 repeater.
We have a combination of mobile and fixed stations. Most are 5.8 Ghz Ubiquiti stations. We use NSM5 radios mounted on aluminum hitch mounted masts to search for strong signal areas. Working the NSM5 mobile with a 10 foot mast from West Salem High School, 22 miles from the Sector near Silver Falls, we measured a 14 dB SNR at 5.885 MHz with 10 Mhz width; that was about 3.6 Mbps throughput. We have two high locations with Rocket M5 Sector 120 antennas facing Salem from the East Hills and South Hills. We really need to find those open view points and hope to find community partners who will allow us to mount our radios on their facilities.
Our mesh took an exponential leap in size as we added 3 tunnel links, at the advice of Julie, AC0WN, who invited us to join the Florence OR AREDN group.
Our combined mesh network now has 33 nodes. We are now testing the Citadel BBS, iperfspeed, meshchat, and have just installed a PBX server.
Florence already has services for VOIP, meshchat, cameras, tunneling, and WinLink. With all their services running, we hope to get our VOIP running, too.
They use cell phones and RaspPBX to make mesh VOIP calls from the EOC and Fire Station agencies.
Your fax investigations may be helpful to us, too. We don't have this service.
We can use the mesh now to transfer normal image files and documents to Citadel fairly quickly. At this stage, I guess we can use a cell phone to take a photo of a paper document, but that is not as easy as a sheet fed scanner. We can send large PDF files; a 6 MB file takes about 1 minute.
There are currently bugs in the Citadel BBS for Raspbian and Ubuntu Mate which corrupt file attachments to email messages.
We would be interested in building a live mesh mapping server as used in Ventura County, CA.
If you would like to tunnel to our Salem and Florence combined AREDN Network, I can have you contact our network guy, Frank, KJ7DZ.
This way we can test and share services and possibly arrange chat or cooperate in SET exercises.
73,
Brett
KG7GDB, Salem