Another area to get our feet wet in!! 

The Niagara Peninsula Amateur Radio Club www.nparc.on.ca is now working to get a Mesh Network up and running here in the peninsula.  We hope to have 3 to 6 WiFi units up by the end of this year, with several more added in the year.  Other than some tall trees we are generally in a flate terrian around here so a few good omni antennas would be expected.  Myself, I plan on installing both a TP-Link Dish and a TP-Link Omni onto the same tower at around 40 feet, and rotate them with a TV rotor.  Yet to decide on how much amplification to use, 2W, 3W, or 5W.  (My neighborours will love me!!).  We will make sure that all stations that get on the air are located onto the map for others to see.  I will update everyone on our progress.

Cheers &73s

Kevin, President, NPARC

Greetings!

I've recently took an interest in Hamnet and have set up a couple of nodes already. I am actually posting this through a 2 node network with an Internet gateway set up on one of the nodes. Currently this is just a lab setting as the nodes are both sitting on my desk. 

Regardless, there's a few hams locally that appear to be interested. One of the nodes on my desk actually belongs to a fellow ham and another 2 hams are waiting on gear they have ordered. 

I spoke about Hamnet at our last club meeting and the club itself may be interested in running a node or two.

The biggest problem right now is that we are in a fairly rural area, with only a few hams interested, so I suspect long haul 2.4 GHz is going to be a challenge. We should be able to alleviate some of this with decent antennas and some amps but we'll see. Right now we are trying for a proof of concept only. 

Anyway, I just wanted to say hi and let you know what we've been working on here on the east coast of Canada :)

73 de VE1XT

One other resource to remember is the Elmer's List on here. (Look on the left menu once logged in).

I know I read somewhere on here and now for the life of me cannot find it.

At what percentage is considered a reliable connection between 2 nodes.  I thought I read 20% but wanted to confirm this.

Thanks,

Jess

KC9QEA

I'm going to step in here and I hope Glen doesn't mind.

I've only heard of HSMM-Mesh for about a month now. I saw that behemoth of an e-book and agree with one of the other posters that I do not learn that way either. One attribute that I do possess is a fundamental knowledge of network topology.

Soooo.......  If reading a 500 page e-book is not your, thing you could always do what I did. Grab a few routers (nodes), and upgrade the firmware, then pick up a couple of cheap/obsolete/antiquated computers or laptops and plug them into each node in a testbed environment.

The first thing I did was to install mumble (murmur) one one of the systems to act as a voice chat server and then the client on both of the computers. WALA!! instant voice chat.

I've recently come across a HOW-TO on creating a VoIP phone system that would run on a node and act as a "Central Control". Once I get a node configured to handle that I'll download some softphone software to act as the VoIP clients. Eventually I'll probably purchase some actual VoIP phones to use instead of the sotfphones.

I'm sure every Ham Club has a handful of guys/gals who have above average technical knowledge in regards to computers and computer networking. Solicit the help of these people. Get a couple of nodes connected, show them what you have and ask them what kind of resources they think could be provided over the MESH. This will not only get you some technical expertise that a single person may not possess, but it will also get other people involved in establishing nodes in your area.

I am fortunate, I have a few other Hams in my area that are interested in this project. Between the four of us, we all have some computer network knowledge/experience. We also understand that before trying to establish the application (ie. software) side. We need to solidify the network infrastructure. It does no good to build an elaborate house when the foundation is made of sand. We are looking into establishing some VPN tunnels (There is a HOW-To on this site) to help connect the guys who are out of reach, we are trying to get some locations with height to help increase the coverage area, and we are trying to show some of the other Hams in the area some of the future benefits of having a MESH network.

For those wanting to have "something" running on their network right off the bat. Set up a Mumble server for voice chat and look through the forums for a HOW-TO on creating a HAMChat node for text based communications. For experimentation purposes you could always pick up a couple of IP Cameras and set one of the node computers to act as the camera server and have the cameras on a couple of other nodes. If you know of a Ham who has a little web development experience you could take an old Pentium 4 machine and turn it into a web server for the MESH. This would in effect be a IntraMesh Website.

With a solid node-to-node connection, just about anything you can do over a traditional computer network, you can do over a MESH Network. You just need to know what resources you want to provide.

Just my 2 cents here.

73's

Jess

KC9QEA

The node has a firewall service that becomes active if the node WAN port is connected to an external network. It would be easy enough to hook a file from an internet server if the external net happened to be the internet. Once loaded, or at least accessible, the gateway node would have its allow deny config. The outside file could be a community-defined list of services or addresses that meet Part 97 acceptability. If the node is not a gateway, or not on the internet, then the file is not attached.

Individual users could:

a) enable it and live with what is in it

b) amend it up or down to suit personal or immediate needs or satisfy a served agency during an emergency using a local include file.

c) point to something else entirely (think Katrina Remediation effort or the ARRL list or Radio Society of Great Britain list or CQ Magazine's list or...)

d) disable it and exercise personal purely local control.

My thoughts on how to do it.I believe large scale consistency in how internet access controls are implemented could be a key feature of BBHN.

More on scenario (b): Here in Huntsville, after The Tornadoes of April 27 2011 power and most forms of communications were down for over a week. Doctors working at an aid station equipped with ARES volunteers desperately wanted access to online perscription medication information. It proved to be very awkward to pass traffic of this sort by voice. A FEMA satellite truck with open WIFI was operating about 2 miles away. A couple or 3 BBHN equipped cars strategically parked could have connected the docs with their "PDR" information. The nature of the situation was such that would have warrented opening up gateway nodes to let through most anything.

A static and well placed mesh backbone is what we are thinking of establishing locally. A techno-toy under most situations, but "When All Else Fails...", well, you know the rest...

Cheers;

Bob KV4PC

Sometimes powering the router off overnight will fix them.

Sometimes it helps to reboot the PC  you're working with.  Some strange things can happen with various forms of caching or reconfiguring when you reconfigure the router, and the PC sometimes doesn't catch up.

I have some soundpoint 501 VOIP phones for sale. I ended up as the high bidder on an ebay lot of 13 and I am looking to sell some. I am going to be using them for testing on Broadband-Hamnet v1 routers with asterisk. 

I am willing to sell 6 of these for now and would only charge $13 (each) plus shipping. They would be tested for working condition but come without a power supply. Power supplies can be found on amazon.com for $13

 http://www.amazon.com/Polycom-SoundPoint-Universal-Power-Supply/dp/B002CT0822/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1382767451&sr=1-3&keywords=soundpoint+501+power+supply

If anyone is interested in this hardware let me know. I also have some POE cables that I may include with the phones.