Hi Gary, It´s not needed to enable "Gateway Mesh" on all the nodes since the phones will find their route through the mesh anyway and register with the PBX.

My setup is using an rPi Asterisk PBX connected to the LAN side of my node that also acts as "Gateway Mesh" and then I have a couple of Cisco phones connected to subsequent nodes in the mesh, on respective LAN side, which works just fine.

I'm curious why the SSID has v1 in the name. Are there plans to expand out to various mesh levels using different SSIDs?

You may be a pioneer in this field, at least for us.  Covering a large area in a systematic fashion is something that we have not had the luxury of being able to do yet.  I hope someone chimes in with experience from actual deployments.  There are already numerous other mesh networks in place.  Perhaps one of their sites could have the answers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region

I finally figure it out and have two Linksys SPA1001 fully working and very well through the Raspberry-Asterisk PBX server.  These modules are great for hooking up to a fax machine through VoIP or using any landline phone into the mesh..  

Setup was easy, these instructions were on the spot for this:
http://www.voiptuto.com/?q=en/spa1001

One other note: You have to enable all nodes (check the box) for "Gateway Mesh" in "Basic Setup" for a remote node to connect it's VoIP phone to the PBX Mesh node.. 

KI5JIM's video tutorial on this site was also useful for first time installers, just need to adjust accordingly for different VoIP devices...

Gary  KI4WPI

SIP is strictly speaking a server less protocol hence why some devices and soft phones can be dialled without the need for a server. Asterisk et al bring a 'known point' enabling a level of end user management.

The mesh potato / village telco project designed a way to use asterisk on every device and create a distributed exchange. It does this by using the last quad of an ip address in decimal form as the extension number eg 192.168.1.034 gives an extension of 034 for that mesh nodes location.

What this needs however is a bit of co-ordination so that all mesh nodes have a unique ip (easy to do in a 'village') and a manual way of circulating the new number (again easy in a village). Once circulated all asterisk is doing is prefixing the '192.168.1" part back onto the 034 thats dialled by the end user and sending out the SIP string, same as the soft phones mentioned.

What Serval seems to have achieved is a way of self aware distributed directory enquiries AND equally as importantly to give first chance to the handsets mobile number to become its identifier on the mesh network.

This is what will allow an uncordinated mesh to create a VoIP network, if our callsigns were pure numbers this would be easy, but they are not..

Both projects seem to have been initially funded by Shuttleworth foundation and are supposed to be on open source terms, in fact Serval is borrowing parts of MP2.0 tech to make its 'mesh extenders'. Hopefully once its done its community funding and its commercial arm is set up the source will be made available. Unless I have missed it somewhere.

Greetings all,

Read about this in QST and I really like it!

So that begs the question... is anyone doing anything in Columbia, SC?

Two of us in our group have tried the HamChat install on two separate v1.0.0 nodes following the detailed install instructions with poor results. All users see the HamChat page requesting the login; but after logging in, anything typed in the text entry box is lost on pressing SEND and does not appear in the chat portion of the screen. During the install I did yesterday, I made sure I created the folders and used the chmod command exactly as in the instructions (using PuTTY). I did use WinSCP to transfer the two files and to verify the permissions on the files and folders after the install. After attempting to send several lines of text, I checked the DATA folder with WinSCP and found it empty. Any suggestions? 73

OK, I am a ham that is trying to setup two mesh's...

I am a System and Network Admin at a local college, so I know my way around networking and was trying to setup a mesh network designed around 192.168.x.x for part 15 use (since family usage is 100% NOT part 97...and I am sick of cables and trying to keep stuff powered when the utility has issues, or the lawn mower hits my internet feed...) and then work with other local hams to setup the standard 10.x.x.x mesh/lan setup for my ham use...

What I have not found how to set is the lan subnet when in 5 host or 13 host mode...

Is there a way to do this?

W8QPP