A first goal might be a unidirectional antenna at someone's home that has some elevation. Around North Utah County here that would be Suncrest or maybe Cedar Hills. Does anyone here live in a spot that a few others could aim at?

I agree it could be interesting to grow the mesh. I have given routers to my neighbors for this :)

I want to have IP camera, weather sensors that we could connect to. It would be pretty amazing to have those at a remote cabin we could mesh into. I've got a huacam on order that can do onvif video and also easily serve out jpeg still images. I haven't played with the weather sensor stuff. In any case we can bring this up at the microcontroller meetup. We've discussed mesh network in this group. http://www.meetup.com/MakeSaltLake/events/221721572/

I have a node up at the south end of Cedar Hills.  Not as much elevation as the north part of Cedar Hills.  But looking back in my logs I see that it connected briefly with kg7dgh-4 on April 27 around 10:30 pm.  It's been down most of the time since then due to a construction project at my house, but I put it back up last week.  It's on the south side of the house and has a clear view to the south and west, which is not ideal for connecting to Highland.  But I'm intrigued since they did see each other that one time in the past.  Has your node moved since then or is it still in the same location?

Hi n7ego. Your mesh was contacted by my mobile rig, namely a router in my car. I picked up about 5 stations driving around doing errands Salt Lake around that time as well. I have to remember to check it before it loses power. Sometimes you can see contact was made but not established well enough to get a callsign and other times there is a callsign in the history.

I've set up hamchat on my node and put it in the advertised services jic.

I think a cool hack while we are still trying to grow to an interesting network would be for hamchat to log connect & disconnects with other mesh nodes. I dug around and looked at the APIs that are used to get the mesh topology and it could watch for changes there.

A mobile rig!  That explains why our nodes only connected once.

I run a script once an hour as a cron job on a Raspberry Pi attached to one of my mesh nodes.  It sends me an email whenever my node sees a new "neighbor" for the first time.

#!/bin/bash
if test $# -lt 1; then
	echo "Usage: meshNotify <host>"
	exit 1
fi

# Get list of current connections from the mesh node
cd ~/meshNotify
scp -i ~/.ssh/petKey -P 2222 root@$1:/tmp/node.history .
cat node.history | mawk '{print $3}' > nodeList

# Compare with the previous list and figure out what's new
fprev="nodeList.old"
newNodes=""
if [ -e "$fprev" ]
then
	newNodes=$(grep -v -f nodeList.old nodeList)
fi
cp nodeList nodeList.old
echo "New nodes:"
echo $newNodes

# Email list of new nodes
if [ -n "$newNodes" ]; then
	echo "Sending email"
	echo "Subject: Mesh node connection" > msg.txt
	echo "" >> msg.txt
	echo "Connection from new node(s):" >> msg.txt
	echo $newNodes >> msg.txt
	cat msg.txt | /usr/sbin/ssmtp myemail@example.com
	echo "Email content: "
	cat msg.txt
	rm msg.txt
fi