A 47.8-mile 3.4 GHz AREDN MESH link was brought online today linking Anchorage to the Yetna area. A few weeks ago, Bryan Emerson, KL4A, checked in with me to see about hosting a MESH node at his remote homestead in the Yetna area. After running some path studies and figuring out a technical solution, we decided to deploy a 3.4 GHz Ubiquiti RG26 dish with M3 Rocket radio to his site.
Bryan’s plan was to mount the dish at about 70 feet up his Rohn 25G tower to clear the local trees in order to get a true line of site to our Site Summit node. We built a Cat5e cable long enough to get out of his shack and up the tower and turned the unit on. Initial results showed that the remote unit could see our Site Summit and Hillside South nodes in Anchorage, and vice versa, but the signal to noise ratio (SNR) was not adequate to provide any actual data throughput. Bryan eyeballed the dish from the ground and decided that it looked like it might be pointed a bit skyward, so up the tower he went again. This time, he had a ground crew (his wife!) monitor the signal strength as reported by the radio on the web browser. He managed to get about 6 more dB of SNR wrung out by improving the aim, but this still wasn’t quite enough to do the trick.
At this point, things were looking pretty shaky and I was worried that we were out of luck. But, fortunately, I gave our MESH Mentor, Tom Delker, K1KY in Smyrna, TN a call to discuss. Tom suggested a couple strategies to try to make this work. First, we elected to decrease the link bandwidth from 20 MHz to 10 MHz. Second, we changed frequency to be clear of other frequencies were using for the MESH system. To affect this change, we had to consider 5 other nodes on the network and had to make similar changes to those units. When it was all said and done, we had it! A solid 6.5 to 9 Mbps link!
Expansion! In a big way!
Tom reports that this is the longest MESH link he’s aware of our connected networks! And this wasn’t even a dish-to-dish link! It was a dish to sector antenna link! We know that a dish-to-dish link would absolutely have better performance, but we are happy with our results! Maybe a dish-to-dish link will follow?!
Many thanks to Bryan for hosting this node and doing all the leg work at the distant end. Thanks to Tom Delker for his solid advice and oversight. More to follow!
73,
Kent Petty, KL5T
Anchorage AREDN MESH Network Manager
Well done!
73
Orv W6BI
Joe AE6XE
We did make it better today....pretty cool.
Regards,
Kent, KL5T
Long Range MESH Link Enhanced! What happened?
By KENT PETTY Published MARCH 1, 2019 ARES, MESH NETWORKING, RF EXPERIMENTS
And we continue to learn. Wow, there is so much to this MESH networking endeavor, and much to learn that is so unexpected!
Today, I thought we could enhance the northern section of the Anchorage area MESH network by pressing the NNE facing 120 sector at ANMC into useful (rather than static) service. That meant I needed to change frequencies on the unit to match that of the other nodes in North Anchorage and SiteSummit, and to also pull the bandwidth down to match these other nodes (from 20 down to 10 MHz).
The result, great connections to EARS and Site Summit, as expected, and giving us redundant and backup paths for the network. But, there was more. An unexpected development. To my surprise, I could see the remote node at KL4A near Yetna. What?! That shouldn’t have happened…..well, so I thought. Not only could I see it, but the signal strength was better than that received from that same node at Site Summit! Wow…..but there was virtually no throughput. Why? I needed to increase the “distance” setting on the ANMC node. It’s a speed of light thing that has bit me in the butt before (I’d be happy to talk to you about it if you’re really curious). At any rate, I increased the distance setting to just over 44 miles and BAM!, 18.9 Mbps throughput! So not only did we improve the performance of the Anchorage network locally, but we ended up with a BETTER and redundant link from the Anchorage area out to Yetna. Wonders never cease.
Redundancy is a beautiful think. How about those links!
If you’d like to learn more about MESH networking and/or want to get involved. Stop on down to the RSOC on a Working Wednesday (usually from 6ish to 9ish pm), or on Saturday (usually from 10ish to 2 or 3ish). Or, drop us a line at mesh@kl7aa.org.
73,
Kent Petty, KL5T
AARC MESH Network Manager
Trying to remember, thinking a lodge there is Eaglesong, any relationship?
Joe AE6XE