I now have five WRT54G V2 or V2.2 hardware units running the hsmm-mesh-0.4.3-wrt54g.bin firmware. Currently testing a four node "toy" mesh at home using stock antennas and Part 15 power. There are three locations in Providence / Pawtucket that I plan to deploy forming a triangle that is 1.5 by 3 by 4 miles. There are a few config / software features that I am trying out before moving them. I may have some trouble with terrain as 2 of the 3 locations are in a shallow valley. Next step is to acquire outdoor antennas and small power amplifiers.

That sounds great!

But I would advise to try with just the antennas first. Throwing amps around before even trying to see if you have a good connection just raises the noise floor.

I dont want to come off crass, but this stuff is not like HF/VHF where you can throw an amp on and it does better by default. If you cant get any link with just antennas, adding an amp may not work any better. Use better antennas first off. Maybe raise the antenna higher if possible.

We do 10 miles shots across the Austin Texas metro area, to include the University of Texas campus (small city in itself), WITHOUT ANY AMPLIFIERS. And we get a solid link.

We have one link here, CPRMC to 3M, where we get a link, but is real weak (lots of things in the Fresnel zone). We know we are aimed properly and CAN get a connection, but with the weak sigs, about a 20% connection rate, we will add a 1/2 W BDA to one end and see how that improves the link. If it gets up to 60-70%, then we may move to a 1W BDA. If we get a 95% connection rate, then 1/2W it will stay.

Overpowering microwaves does not gain you anything if you cant hit it at all naturally. Just heats air molecules and wastes electrons.

But definitely post your results! We would love to hear about it.

KTF

That is definitely Plan A. I'm going to borrow a couple of directional antennas which I think are about 14 dBi and I found a good price on an omni that is 9 dBi. I'll run some tests on those in the next week or two to see how they compare. BTW, I found the info at http://hsmm-mesh.org/documentation/124-antennas-and-amps.html very useful. Thanks for the notes, it helpful to learn the details of what has worked well for others.

I have one, maybe two, WRT-54GL's plus a Raspberry Pi that I plan on getting configured with v1.0.0.0 of HSMM-Mesh. The RPi is destined to be connected to a high gain directional antenna that could be linked into the rest of the growing RI network.

- Jim WN1X

Hello, you can contact Myrton N1GKE or me, Mike W9GYR. We are going to meet in Providence this coming Saturday. See the post here: RI mesh meeting Nov. 30

-mikeu

W9GYR