The AREDN Mesh “Home” screen showing currently operational nodes.

We continue to make progress on building out our mesh network each week. Last Saturday, we got the node installed at the club station at Red Cross Headquarters. Theo KK6YYZ climbed the tower and ran the cable with assistance from Michael K6RQV, Brian K6BPM, and Bruce KG6NRW helped out there at the end. A WiFi adaptor was installed and any member should be able to come in with their tablet or smartphone and browse the mesh network by connecting to the mesh WiFi SSID.

Nicely constructed home-brew mount by K6FLD.

Some of our members with more complicated installations are also making progress. Because of their more distant locations, Frank K6FLD and Eric KG6WXC decided to go with Ubiquiti Rocket MS2 radios with high gain dish antennas. Frank needed a custom mounting solution and we worked out the details using inexpensive EMT conduit on the Digital Modes Net. Eric, who lives in an HOA controlled building decided to paint his dish a nice “Dish Networks” shade of grey. Good luck disguising that!

KG6WXC’s “Dish Network” grey dish antenna.

Out next phase will involve installing nodes at the K6TZ repeater site on the Mesa. We could still use some help funding this area as these will be SBARC sponsored and we need these to provide coverage for members who live on the Mesa and unable to see Gibraltar directly. We are also installing a tunneled node up on Santa Ynez Peak so that we can bring in our members in the Santa Ynez Valley. If you can help SBARC with this project, your contribution will be gratefully accepted!

In addition, Tom KA6SOX will be adding special shielded enclosures and cabling to the Gibraltar site nodes to provide interference protection.

For more information about our mesh network project, please click here.

Brian – K6BPM

Post expires at 8:11pm on Friday July 1st, 2016 but will still be available in the archives.

Well a few of you have discovered the website and the chat server and used them! People should just check in from time to time so we know everyone’s alive.

I ran into some problems with the NTP (time) server. I didn’t get a chance to work on it much this week. But I got the GPS module functioning and able to maintain accurate time even if satellite coverage is lost temporarily. That is important for an indoor installation without an outside antenna. The NTP daemon that installs with Raspbian is not natively capable of acting as a Stratum 1 (GPS synchronized) NTP server. So I have to make a few changes to the code and recompile. Luckily I found someone else that did this a couple of years ago, and while the code is not the same, the principle is. So that shouldn’t take long once I get into it.

I was trying to think of a way to set up a mail server to users could communicate privately, but it relies on normal DNS very heavily and it would take too much work. So instead, I am going to set up a bulletin board type forum server using another Raspberry with SMF, MySql and Apache. This will allow users to create private accounts and exchange private messages as well as host conventional public forum functions. I think this will fill the bill and ultimately be a real helpful addition to the mesh network.

There’s talk about hooking up with Ventura county sooner rather than later, and on up to Santa Ynez Peak soon as well. So when we can integrate with the larger mesh, I want SBARC to have a full compliment of services we can show off!

-K6BPM