I added a 1-watt BDA to the setup and the best signal we've seen over the 47+ mile path is -72 dBm.  LQ varies from around 65% to 100%, certainly reliable enough for island-to-island communication.  

Next up is to get our amigos in Puerto Rico hooked into the system.  That will probably be via Vieques, a small island between PR & the USVI.  We may also try directly from St. Croix which would be a distance in the 85 to 90 mile range. 

Regarding the longest distance, I too read about the folks who used a HUGE dish in SA and had a 100+ mile shot from 10,000 foot mountains to the coast.  Having lived in SoCal before, you're right, NOTHING (at least that's known of now) will top the duct to Hawaii.  

Hi Scott.

Back in the early 2000's, a working group was formed at the ARRL, with John Champa as chair, to investigate a broadband solution. In 2006, after much political bureaucracy (aka disagreements/fighting with the ARRL brass) they all quit and the WG disbanded.

Soon after, two gents in Austin, Glenn and Rick, started playing with WRT's. Dave then came in and customized the firmware, Bob came in and did hardware stuff, and that is the 4 founders of the current project. In 2009, I met Glenn, he told me about what they were doing, and I setup this site on one of my servers to try to consolidate all the info out there. And the snowball started rolling down hill from there, with many other people giving it a shove at times.

BTW, the project is NOT officially affiliated (or under any control) with the ARRL or any other group. The core group itself makes all the decisions on what will happen with the project. We are 'affiliated' with the Austin ARC, but mainly because the core members are all AARC members (and I think we are all ARRL members) and well, this is happening right here in Austin. This may upset ARRL brass that I came out and stated this, but the truth is what it is. We learned from history and do not want a repeat.

Now the project is global, with thousands of nodes around the world. When I sit back and think about how far it has come, I am almost astounded at how far that is, and in relatively such a short time. I told the wife sometime last year that I felt the snowball was about to really pick up steam, and this year has just been incredible for the whole project. With the IAEM award and the QST cover, and all the people coming onboard building and deploying nodes and doing other things with it....

So yes, the "core group" is right here in Austin TX, but there are so many others out there contributing, like Rusty up North of Dallas, people in other states and other countries figuring out other things.  I think the biggest thing is all the other evangelists out there who find out about it, play with it, and go out spreading the word. I do all the site registration activations personally, so I get to see all the new people coming onboard. I activate at a very minimum 2 to 5 per day now. Last year it was maybe 10 a week.  Thats why I quit sending out emails for every one that I activate. I wish I could be more personal with each and every one, but I have real (paying) work to do every day :-)

Hope this answers your question.

73

Jim K5KTF

I get the impression that HSMM supports IPv6? There are v6 IPs listed in Node Status for WAN, LAN and WiFi. But I can't seem to ping any of them.

Benny,
Welcome to Broadband-Hamnet! There is noting in particular to pay attention about when flashing. You will just upload the firmware to the Linksys stock firmware from the administration page to convert it over to Broadband-Hamnet. Once the firmware has been uploaded, wait until the DMZ to light up and go off before continuing.

If you have any problems, don't hesitate to look me up on QRZ and send me an email. I'd be happy to help you out.

Paul, KF5JIM

I have acquired about 8 of the '54GS version 1 & 2 models, and was wondering if there is anything special to be particular about when first going about the flashing.  Does anyone know if there is any activity in the Golden Triangle area that has already done this?  I thought if I had someone to look over my shoulder on the first one, the rest of them should go OK.  I have been reading on the web site for several days and trying to digest as much of the info that I can. Looking forward to meeting some of you guys that area already involved.

Benny W5TYZ

Orange, TX

Hi all,

  I am brand new to HSMM-Mesh and am still just learning about it. I was wanting to know who came up with this whole idea in the first place?

  I know that certain cities in Texas seem to be taking a leading role in this whole phenomenon but I'm not certain that that is its true origin.

73

Scott, KC0BUS

That's part of the normal function of BBHN. If you want to administer the nodes, you can do one of two things: Setup a BBHN node in AP mode, or plug your computer into the LAN port of a node.

If you wanted to, you could also SSH into the 192.168.1.10x node, install elinks onto the node (ipkg update && ipkg install elinks), and then type in the ssh terminal "elinks http://<page>:8080/" to administer the nodes connected to the BBHN network. This method does not like web buttons, so it is somewhat limited. You'll also have to know the http://*:8080/cgi-bin/<page> location to navigate from some pages to some pages.

I have two nodes running BBHN v1. Both of them are standard configuration, except that both have static IP addresses on the WAN (wired) port to my home LAN. Only one will usually be connected to the LAN. I did this to facilitate upgrading because I ran into the problem, below.

What I want to do is to connect to the node on my home LAN to use the mesh.

If I connect my computer to one of the LAN ports on the node, reset my PC IP address, and then connect to localnode:8080, I get to the node status page. From the mesh status page I click on the link to the other node and get to its status page, where I can make changes.  This works hte same way on both nodes.  This is the expected behavior.

However, if I connect to one (either) of the nodes through the home LAN be connecting to 192.168.1.100:8080 (or .101), I connect to the node and can look at lin status, remote noedes, etc, and can administer the node.  But if I clik on the link to the other node, it cannot find it. It looks for kg1l-100:8080, which fails dns lookup.

My question" Other than changing the name of my workgroup (Windows) to local.mesh (or what ever it is), is there any way to to setup Windows 7 so I can connect from my home LAN and still be able to connect to remote nodes?

I was watching a video and it said the mesh address was 172. I checked my node and it is 169. Did I do something wrong or can it be 169. I am new to this and thanks for any help.

Have been trying to plan out some possible scenarios for deploying a HSMM-MESH network here in central Illinois. Even though we have no operational nodes in our city, I have been talking with a few HAM's that have expressed interest in getting something started.  Our cities population is about 116,000 and when you take into account some of the "burbs" would put this over 125K. Our coverage area would be about 8 miles total distance from the center of the city.

There are many multi-story buildings in the downtown area that would create a lot of problems getting signals in and around. My biggest concern is getting signals to some pre-determined out of town nodes. I currently have a HAM who has a 100' tower (in a rural setting surrounded by cornfields) and I am able to put a node at approximately 45'.

Using the "Heywhatsthatmap" profile planner it appears on paper that the terrain and signal should be sufficient. Looking at it with an "eyes on the ground" (or in the air if you will) perspective there are a considerable amount of trees at 60' or better near my location in the city. The distance between the two nodes would be 13 miles. When using the online terrain calculators it looks OK, but I have had some other people tell me that if even 1 tree gets in the way the signal is done.

I've seen online where people say they have achieved great distances, but it appears those locales were very flat with minimal vegitation or from mountain top to mountain top.

I have yet another questions about distances and I know that there will be so many variables that the answer would be an educated guess. However, If someone had an an Omnidirectional antenna 45' up and another person had a mobile set up with a mag mount antenna atop a vehicle, in an urban setting, what kind of distance could be realistically expected. I've heard some people say that you'd be lucky to go three city blocks.

I'm still in the learning phase of this so please excuse my lack of knowledge.

Thanks & 73's

Jess

I've attached a copy of the Hey What's That Path Profile image to use as a reference. Could someone give me their thoughts on whether this hop would work or not.

Attachments
 QEA-MAF_Hop.png [2 KB] ::

ANy news on this front???  I would LOVE to be able to use my M2 with HSMM-MESH (er.. BB HN)

I own 2 Ubiquiti based devices out of China which run the Airgrid M2 firmware and was wondering if they will support the firmware for this project and if so which version do i pick ?

73 John Mi0AAZ in Northern Ireland.

I am working between a few radio clubs and we have been testing nodes and trying to gin up some interest.  I have some questions.

Under the old firmware we used alpha omnis tested a 4.3 mile shot in hilly treed terrain and had  good connectivity. 

With the new firmware our testing has not gone well.  We used google earth and splat to check some spots between two radio clubs over water.  Line of sight in good weather.  The 4 mile station would get an occasional ip address and the three mile station got the ip address of the node we were trying to get into but could not see the node name.

Up close and personal I could see the node name, that is next to the node.  Why cant we see the node name from a distance?  We used windows and linux machines

I played with the distance settings and found that auto is no better than most other settings.  If the distance to the furthest node is 4 miles the the distance setting would be 6500?

Went back to the same site where I had a decent signal but no node name under the same weather conditions and got only a few hits from the distant nodes.  Are some ducting issues in play?

We plan to do more testing and we have some interest but we need to work out the distance issue.  Any thoughts?

After all the tinkering with the mesh-server found the problem was with the client. An anti-virus program also block IRC ports. I disabled that feature and it works good.

Jay

What keeps non-hams off of it? Nothing, I would think. Securing your mesh network really shouldn't be your biggest concern. Getting it up and doing something useful are big enough tasks to occupy most. I'm new too, and I'm still struggling with those issues.

Secure mesh networks are easy to build using non-ham software; open-wrt, dd-wrt, et al. I've seen some discussion on the legalities of access control, and the 'wish list' on this web site does list some sort of WEP or other access control as a possible future enhacement. Full encryption of the data passing on the network seems to run counter to both US and Canadian law.

Consider that if you're worried about someone seeing the data you're accessing on the mesh, perhaps it shouldn't be there? Amateur related communications are usually about as benign and un-interesting to the average hacker as the nightly news. During emergency operations, when the rules change a bit, perhaps content can be secured from source to destination with VPN solutions.

Personally, I'm confident I can protect the services I connect to my mesh. I do have an internet gateway on one of my nodes, but I can control what gets accessed from the source. I don't worry about the mesh itself being compromised.

As I see it, the only risk is to the ability of the mesh to operate effectively caused by deliberate interference or attacks on the node itself. Nice thing about a mesh is that if that happens, turn off the affected node and the mesh can heal itself around the problem. Yeah, that's an ideal situation but it is a primary goal of the technology.

I tend to think about the security of my nodes like I think about the security of my repeaters; if someone wants to be a 'lid' and mess with 'em, I can always turn them off. And if problems persist, well, that's what 'fox hunting' trains you for, isn't it?

I would really hate to see a situation arise, even out of defensive necessity, where a guest ham would have to jump through hoops, apply to 4 people, be approved by 6, and post a bond in order to join a mesh and look up the local repeater frequencies. I think that violates the basic ethics of amateur radio operating.

I don't know, perhaps a 'don't worry, be happy' attitude is a bit naive, but those are my thoughts. I'm always ready to learn.

I've started down the path of MESH networking, I'm still in the research phase and have just started to compile a few tidbits of equipment. My biggest concern however is how to secure a Mesh network.

Other than the FCC saying "you can't". What mechanisms are in place to keep "Johnny Highschooler" from doing his own research, installing the firmware, and hacking into a HAM MESH?

I realize that the MESH network is just a bunch of nodes and if one were to provide any type of services over it would require computers with software etc. But what keeps Non-HAMS off of it?

Thanks and 73's

Jess

Michael KF7MBK has built a dish that works quite well.

Click this link for a few photos.
http://phxmesh.com/kf7mbk.php

He has a few links with build info here.
http://phxmesh.com/links.php#ant