PROGRESS, BUGS & ToDo

     Here I will keeping and log of what I have done, how I have done it, and what is running or NOT running. It will be updated nearly daily, as I will be working on this daily. So Please look back to see what I have done, and at what stage I am at.

Progress:

May 13 2013

• HSMM-MESH Freshly installed on NEW WRT54GS
• POE Modification completed to main board
• Asterisk 1.6.1 w/ VoiceMail, Sounds, and GUI Installed

May 14 2013

• Linksys SPA942 IP Phones Making a connection but being rejected by Asterisk **FIXED**
• Solution : Phones required an updated firmware from Cisco for SIP comparability with Asterisk

May 15 2013

• Phones are talking Locally (On the same node)
• AsteriskGUI is installed and running... But Lacks much use as a GUI :)
• Second Asterisk Node Setup to Match First and is also fully functioning with the Phones

May 18 2013

• Installed Asterisk 1.4 w/ DUNDi support on both nodes
  
• AsteriskGUI is installed and Running again.
• Am able to make connection on individual nodes...

May 28 2013

• DUNDi is now fully functioning
• Ports are all properly forwarded and opened
• Phones properly configured
• We have Telephony contacts across the MESH
  

Bugs:

May 13 2013

• AsteriskGUI not functioning Properly. It will not save the settings, not allowing me to continue past this point in "Making it easy to use". **FIXED**
• Solution : AsteriskGui needed to be installed in the /WWW directory root. I changed the styles.CSS to ast-styles.css . and corrected the pointer in asterisk.HTML to point to ast-styles.css

May 14 2013

• AsteriskGUI Still not functioning, In process of finding an alternate for OpenWRT **FIXED**
• Solution : See above..
• Linksys SPA942 firmware not compatable with asterisk, Updating requiered **UPDATED**
• Solution : Firmware sucessfuly updated to new Cisco version.

May 18 2013

• No able to make call across MESH from node to node.. Keep getting Crypto not loaded error **FIXED**
• Solution : OpenSSL and the Crypto Module for Asterisk needed to be loaded by commenting so in asterisk.conf
  

ToDO

• Make DUNDi run autonomously (Find and rout to newly attached Nodes with Asterisk/DUNDi)
• Establish communications via a tunnel from MESH to MESH
• Build a deployable package/script to ease installation
  

Does this have any potential?

http://blog.grimwire.com/#2013-04-04-grimwire.md

73, David KD4E

There IS a gain omni that is HORIZONTALLY polarized without the nasty downtilt of a standard omni (aka colinear, etc: more gain=more downtilt).

Its called a slotted waveguide.

I have a  borrowed one out in my shop, that used to be on the AMD site in SW Austin. It had excellent coverage when in use.

I have seen some DIY articles of people who made them out of gutter downspouts.....

You can buy one premade/tuned for around $400 (that stung, didnt it?)

73

KTF

Thank you Mickey, That is exactly what we are doing now - looking at which elevated locations we can put the nodes. Part of my question was also trying to understand whether we should only count on tower-to-home links or the home-to-home links would also be possible? And I don't mean if they live next door, that would be obvious.

Also do you think using omni-s is possible in the mesh? I understand, that the high gain omni would be hard to target, as the vertical angle would be too low. However I could see a couple of cases where a node would have potential links in four different directions, so omni could have been a logical choice, but would it work? I mean is there a chance it will work reliably, or four directionals is the way to go?

And yes, I do mean the 3-5 mile links, not the event site mesh. I have been a part of the event site mesh and I know it works. Now we need to get the bigger stuff working. 73, Anthony va3idl

That is EXCELLENT!!  Thanks!  I always wondered about doing that.

I think your characterization is correct.  Even with gain antennas, we're mostly line of sight. 

As for 2.4 GHz vs. 70 cm, we are 5 times shorter wavelength at 2.4, so we're a lot more line of sight.  I think water also absorbs a lot more signal at 2.4 GHz, so attenuation of trees and other obstacles is higher.

We're still basically wifi with a few advantages:

• Gain antennas are legal because we're hams.
• The mesh design lets us link multiple nodes automatically to fill gaps in RF coverage and daisy chain links.
  

Gain antennas help more than you might think because they not only give you a higher signal strength, they reduce the strength of interfering signals outside of the beam.  They still don't let you "blast" through houses or trees.  The attenuation is just too high.   You mostly have to get over or around the trees and houses.

Mesh also allows you to put one mesh node right at the actual elevated outdoor antenna location and not have to have a long coax run.  Coax loss per foot at 2.4 GHz are really high.  Put one node on the antenna, make long links to other nodes, and then you can put another mesh node inside if that helps. 

As hams, we CAN use amplifiers, but they don't help as much as you would think, and you should avoid amps except in special circumstances so you aren't unnecessarily interfering with other users.

You're not likely to blanket a city with enough mesh nodes that you can just set up a node with standard antennas and get a link.   You're going to have a limited number of fixed nodes prelocations with long range links and good antenna locations that serve as "hotspots."  You need to set up these locations ahead of time.

When an emergency arises, you either need these nodes at the places where you need service, or you need some deployable nodes with gain antennas that can connect to the fixed mesh node locations.  You'll also need people who can set these nodes up and places to put the antennas with a line of sight to the fixed nodes.

Even if you have no long range mesh connections, mesh is useful within an event site in several ways.

I will start by saying that I am now coordinating the efforts of building the Mesh in Mississauga, Ontario. I am talking to people and reading the posts on this forum and elsewhere in the Internet. And from what I see is that out of ten people who had placed their Mesh antennas, nine would not connect to anyone so far. One out of ten is a pretty weak success rate. And the reason people tell for not being connected is the lack of line of sight.

It is pretty clear to me now that if you can literally see your counterpart and are using directional antennas to point there, even the stock power will be sufficient. Obstacles in the Fresnel zone might somewhat hurt you but in general you are good. My question is if it is at all possible to establish the link if you can not see the repeater, though the map shows your line of sight. I will give an example. Nowhere in our suburban area can I see our 70cm repeater antenna. I am always surrounded by a 1- or 2- storey buildings and 5-storey high trees. Yet the handy-talky works perfectly on 440 from inside the building not to mention the 2-nd floor or the roof.

Has anyone had a successful link on 2.4GHz where there was no visual, but the only obstacles were the trees and wooden houses, not the ground or concrete structures? With or without the amplifier.

Thank you,

Anthony va3idl

Ok, so far we are working with a Mesh that is not connected to the Internet. However, I have recently installed a Pharos 360 GPS unit (inspired by K5KTF's article under the Applications link). 

I then wrote a simple perl program and a cron job script to grab the date and time data from the gps and set the node's date/time with the date command. So far it is only accurate to within about a minute, but that's a lot better that "Jan 1 2000" Now, I'm thinking about setting up a local time server on the same node to pass the date/time to other nodes. 

There's no pride in authorship here. I've been out of the programming world for nearly 20 years, so this was a 're-learning' experience for me. I'm sure there are probably more elegant ways to accomplish this. I'm open to improvements. I'm sure there are some regular expression ways to reformat, I'm just VERY rusty on my regular expressions! 

My first version was writing the time data to a file and then reading the file. Now, I've combined it and avoided the step involving the file completely.

Here's how I did it:

GPS unit is directly soldered to the second serial port with three wires. Once initiated at boot-up, it sends a continual stream of data at 4800 baud to /dev/tts/1. 

I set up a cron job to run every two hours to capture the GPRMC line of data from the GPS and pipe it to a perl program (fmtgpsdate) which pulls out the date and time date and re-formats it to something the date command can understand. Although the documentation at OpenWRT shows thre or four different acceptable formats, I could only get one (the one shown below) to actually work. All others returned an "Invalid Date" error from the date command.

crontab -e

Added the following line:

15 */2 * * * date -s `head /dev/tts/1|grep GPRMC | perl /www/cgi-bin/fmtgpsdate`

to tell the system to run the command at 15 minutes past the hour every two hours. Note: the argument for the date command is surrounded in backticks (under the ~ on my keyboard), not apostrophes. It tells the shell to execute the command.

I saved the following perl program in /www/cgi-bin/ directory, although it should probably be in /etc/sbin/ or similar. It's called fmtgpsdate.

#!/usr/bin/perl

$debug = 0;

use perlfunc;

# Read in  GPRMC Data from previous command

($gps_type, $gps_time, $gps_state, $gps_lat, $gps_ns, $gps_lon, $gps_ew, $gps_speed, $gps_track, $gps_date, $gps_rest) = split(',',<STDIN>);

# Format the data to acceptable form

print "20" . substr($gps_date,4,2) . "." . substr($gps_date,2,2) . "." . substr($gps_date,0,2) . "-" . substr($gps_time,0,2) . ":" . substr($gps_time,2,2) . ":45";

I then issued:

chmod +x fmtgpsdate 

to make it executable.

I wish I could do the cron job at boot-up but it takes some time for the gps to acquire the data. Again, its not accurate to the second. The GPRMC data is only accurate to the minute (no seconds are provided). So, I added 45 seconds to the minute which seems to get me fairly close to the actual time.

Have fun- 73s

W5CWT, David

Woot.com has Panasonic KX-TG254SK DECT 6.0 4-Handset Cordless Phone System with Link-to-Cell for $49.99

The discussion indicates that they will work with VoIP.

Just a heads-up!

I was exploring with the few NODES I have here for my personal MESH. And I changed one to AP Mode, and Now I CAN NOT connect to it in any useable way.

I am able to see it via wireless, but cannot get an IP from it, or anything useable. I have tried connecting it to an other working node to get the IP address from it.. how ever I still get nothing.

Any suggestions??

I have the ability to connect to asterisk VIA wifi. How ever, I cant seem to figure out how to connect my HSMM-MESH Node with my wifi SIP Phone. Can anyone give me any kind of instruction?

Tried to follow instructions, got my tongue caught in the ceiling fan.

Seriously, thanks for the effort and posting the info here.

I wish more folks would contribute like this.