We finally got around to upgrading our solar hilltop node wrt54g to 3.0 and now 3 of us are connected. One is 4.5 miles from the node with a wrt54g, the others is 10.25 miles away with a Ubiquiti Bullet M2 HP and parabolic, and I am 7.5 miles away also with Ubiquiti Bullet M2 HP with Parabolic. I am getting 89% link quality without fine tuning the aim. We tested file transfer speeds between myself and the other ubiquiti node through the hilltop node with maximum file transfer rate of 11KB/s. 

I've attached a photo. Don't have any of the inside but it consists of a WRT54G, charge controller, and AGM battery.

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 node.jpeg [221 KB]

The one pictured is a 15. I believe we upgraded to 60 watts and added a larger battery. It stayed on all night last night and went out this morning for an hour before the sun came up.

I am working on a mesh project right now for emergency deployment (ARES). Ideally I would like to have a similar setup (outdoor antenna, outdoorbox for electronics, solar panel, and battery). I do have a few questions for you.

1. Did you upgrade from the 15w panel to the 60w panel because you had to? Will that allow you to fill the battery you have and run solely off the battery for 3 days without any solar power? I have heard of people shooting for that goal with their setups.

2. What size (mah) battery are you using?

3. What antenna are you using? Gain?

I currently have 2 WRT54G v2's that I am using to experiment with but at some time I will need to buy other hardware and test this in the wild to see how it performs so I am trying to get ideas on what I should be considering for power and such. :)

Thanks for any help.

Another example 'hill-top' 'in-the-wild' configuration (see picture links below):

1) Bullet M2 - 15db Omni

2) Rocket M5 - 19db 120 deg sector

3) Trendnet ipCam (indoor camera has lasted 1 year under a pizza lid and still live)

4) 125aH deep cycle Walmart battery (and is 4 years old)

5) 110W solar panel with charge controller

6) UBNT aircam

This configuration went ~5 days with constant clouds in December short-sun days before dropping offline in the middle of the night in Southern California. I am considering increasing battery capacity next fall to get through the winter (and adding more equipment from my wish list of 900mhz, 3Ghz, weather station, Rasb-Pi, etc.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2bEy75HhwWhNEhuTkYyYzRwV2M/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2bEy75HhwWhQ0ZvOEhRbTNVZms/view?usp=sharing

Joe AE6XE

Passive POE at battery voltage.   12v system. 

For short runs Ubiquiti devices should run fine off of 12v battery voltage.

By short I mean around 25 foot  for what I would personally want to take it to (you can use an Ethernet power drop calculator to see more results, you may be willing to take it further, it is just that is my comfort zone) anything else unless you already have a need for an inverter I would instead suggest a MeanWell DC/DC supply.

the SD-25a-12 ( stable 11-16v out run it at 16v, line loss will be less than battery voltage) or the sd-25a-24 (officially 23-30v out I have seen the adjustment pot let it go lower but  I avoid running out of spec) for those 100ft  or greater lengths (set to 23v -- remember thr boards start frying at 24v at the connector) 

If you need several nodes they also come in a 50w version.

I've got my mountain top node running off of one plugged into a (grid charged) 79.2kwh battery bank (obviously the node isn't the only user of the batteries at that size of bank) 

They have a wide input range (9-18vdc for the 12v model) meaning your battery will be the first to die (Hint: make sure you have a battery cutoff circuit in place, I've see the 12 to 5v converter take the battery down to 4.9v once) 

For nodes powered by solar, the charge controllers have low voltage disconnects. (Well, you might spend just enough to have this feature in a charge controller.) In my case, I'm using a ProStar. The load low voltage disconnect is at 11.4v (~15% remaining battery capacity) and the reconnect is at 12.6v (meaning sufficient sunlight to power load and charge the battery).