Have you seen the Vocore? http://vocore.io/

or the Onion "Omega"? https://onion.io/omega/

> a remote base station was established on the NJ OEM 222 MHz repeater.

Got any details what comprised the remote base hardware?

Thanks

Mark K5LXP

Albuquerque, NM

I do volunteer work for the American Red Cross, New Jersey Region, on the Disaster Services Technology (DST) team. About 3 weeks before the recent visit of Pope Francis to the United States, I was contacted by Fred, WW2VEH, to discuss a backup plan to cover communications in cities in several states: New York City, Fairfield, NJ, Tinton Falls, NJ, and Philadelphia. What made this discussion interesting was that 3 Red Cross regions needed to communicate for one event, a situation not normally encountered. Fred asked me if I could put together some sort of phone system that could be deployed to these 3 cities as well as several field locations. Using elements of technology from amateur mesh operations and the AllStar Link Network, I was able to deploy a system across those cities using voip phones, an AllStar repeater node and remote base station, and mesh tunnels. Tying this all together was an Asterisk PBX.

Each city had one or two phones tied back to the main AllStar pbx. A tunnel server was established at the pbx end on a Ubiquity Nano station and tunnel clients using Linksys routers were established at each of the locations with phone(s). A dial plan was established enabling the phones to directly dial each other. Behind each phone there was voice mail as well a conference bridge available to all users. In the background, a number of test extensions were configured on the pbx to assist with provisioning the network. At Tinton Falls, 3 phones were set up: one directly off the tunnel client and two others via mesh on 2.4 GHz. Philadelphia had one phone, Fairfield had two phones and New York City had two phones.

Midway through the operation, a remote base station was established on the NJ OEM 222 MHz repeater. This was made available to all users through a special extension number.

All but one of the tunnel clients came up without incident. The one that did not come up was blocked by corporate firewall rules which did not allow unusual ports to leave the premises. All the phones worked well, except for one phone via mesh. The remote base station worked well, even though it was a 1 watt portable talking to a repeater 40 miles away with an attic mounted antenna.

None of the field locations were activated. However, in preparation for activating one location, a ViaSat satellite link was set up in the parking lot of Tinton Falls. A tunnel client was established over this link and the voip phone came up fine. Several calls were placed over this phone, and other than a long turn-around time, voice quality was good.

Some takeaways:

1. The phone that did not work via mesh was on a Part 15 channel. During the operation, Red Cross personnel did all their work via wireless laptops, between 20 and 30 units. In the future, phones connected this way will need to be using ham band only channels.
2. To remedy the problem of the client node being blocked by a firewall, perhaps a design change could be made allowing port 80 or maybe 443 to be used for tunnels.

Some pictures can be seen on the mesh at

http://n2mh-meshphone2/redcross/pope

Weblinks

AllStarLink Network

https://allstarlink.org/

AllStar on a BeagleBone Black or Raspberry Pi 2

http://crompton.com/hamradio/BeagleBoneBlackAllstar/

73, Mark, N2MH

Hello All,

I have a mesh node up now - but have some basic networking questions (it is a Ubiquiti Bullet M5-Ti) - 

*  WAN I/F - Is it best to leave that as DHCP (I do have a local network DHCP server running) or should I set that to be static and something that routes OK locally?

*  LAN I/F - Should I leave that as is - or do I need to make sure that can route on my local net?  I have made sure the LAN DHCP server works and have connected to the Bullet's Web GUI through the LAN using one of the DHCP'ed addresses - but what is a little unclear is how a client 'meshes in' and uses the LAN address.

*  Wireless I/F - That is pretty clear - and I have used what the bootcode suggests.

So, for the node - how does the routing work?  Does a client connect from the Wireless I/F - and then traffic for the Internet goes to/from the WAN I/F?  Then what is the purpose of the LAN I/F - is that just for local physical access (I assume) - I am just wondering how someone makes a client connection or maybe that is just the wrong way to look at this.

I am trying to figure out if I need to set up any routes or firewall rules on my main internet router to make all of this work.

I have looked at a lot of the things posted here - but I haven't seen anything that says if local firewall or routing tables need to be changed to make this useful.  I will set up a client station soon - maybe all of this gets obviated when you do that.

73's,
John
AJ6BC 

FYI, Channel 11 is part 15 only (not shared with part 97) and the use of amplifiers is illegal there.

(Ch1 thru 6 are shared, as well as channels less than 1/the negative channels)

This boils the rules down nicely:  http://www.afar.net/tutorials/fcc-rules

By chance, did you test it and backup your device before upgrading with my U-Boot Test tool?

http://bit.ly/u-boot-test

or

http://tinyurl.com/u-boot-test

Hello Again,

I have a Bullet M5-Ti online - at least it is broadcasting the SSID.

I want to do a better mounting job and I will get a better Omnidirectional antenna soon.

Bullet gets a little warm - I noticed Streakwave is out of them - at least the US version - does anyone

know if they are addressing the heat issue?  I have seen a lot of complaints about these overheating.
I may come up with a way for a short run to the antenna to keep the unit running cooler.

73's,
John
AJ6BC 

I'm the proud owner of two M2 Bullet bricks thanks to the XM.v.5.6.x firmware incompatibility. The OpenWRT site seems to indicate this can be prevented by "downgrading" a newer XM.v.5.6.x unit to an older Ubiquiti firmware such as XM.v.5.5.x before attempting to load the Hamnet firmware. Before investing further in this project, I'd like to hear from someone who has successfully done this.

Is there anyone out there who has successfully "unbricked" one of these newer units?

Is there anyone out there who has successfully flashed bbhn-3.1.x into a M2 Bullet of this latest generation?

73,

Chuck - AI4WU

Hello All,

I was thinking about getting a Ubiquiti Bullet-M - but don't know if that is still a good idea or not after seeing the announcement.

So, for my area - what is the best choice?  I liked the Bullet since I could try it with the omni-directional antenna - but I don't know if I will 'brick' the unit or not.

I will peruse the rest of the forum.

73's,
John
AJ6BC 

We're looking for a way to include IP address / Node Name information in a Hosts File style in order to show node names more quickly (i.e. before a successful connection has been made to the node).

There is a hosts file.  /etc/hosts  but it says not to edit it as it is dynamically created.

It says to use /etc/hosts.user, however, when we create that file it doesn't seem to be included.

We have 15 or so active nodes here, and growing, which include at least a couple of mobile nodes.  It would be nice to allow the nodes to recognize known nodes before connecting and passing all of the info needed to display the names.

Just wondering what it is that makes version 5 and up incompatible with bbhn? Is it a lack of memory and if so has anyone tried any sort of physical mods to try to remedy this? I'm curious because I have 3 of them and want to see what I can do with them.

Thanks!

Shawn

(KE6YCO)