January 2016 - PSDR - mailman.hamwan.org

Damage report, Mr.Sulu
by Bart Kus 06 Apr '16

06 Apr '16

So, we're taking a beating. This wind+rain storm has caused an outage on our QueenAnne<->Haystack link: QA-Haystack It's also taken down our ETiger<->SnoDEM link: ETiger-SnoDEM And the Baldi site has lost power for several short periods throughout the day today. There are generators on-site, but the UPS there is dead, so it causes brief outages as power switches over. I'm not sure if we're on generators or not @ Baldi right now, but it's up at least. Now, even though we're taking this beating, I'm pleased to report that none of these link failures have caused any parts of the network to become disconnected. We are still routing 100% of HamWAN! On the down side, we just burned through all our redundancy, and the next link to go down will cause an outage somewhere. --Bart

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Kitsap County Gold Mountain HamWAN Attempts, Dish and Sector Antennas K7MM
by Daniel Ransom 27 Jan '16

27 Jan '16

Tom. Here is a status update on my efforts at accessing the Gold Mountain HamWAN. I went out with my two MikroTik Metal 5SHPn transceiver modems, one of my dishes, and a sector antenna this morning. I tested from the corner of E Collins Road and Babydoll Rd, at 47.548349, -122.5939, here in east Port Orchard. From this location I can see the flashing white beacon on Gold Mountain. I get a good signal on the mesh dish: -69 dBm. The vertically polarized sector antenna (SA58-90-17-WB) has 10 dB less signal, but the modem will "associate" with the network. Pointing is not critical--I've got about 15 degrees each way, a 30-degree sweep where I have reasonable signal (around -80 dBm). This is at ground level. It should work when I hoist it into the trees behind my house. I have two modems; one has a broken back-cover latch and is on v6.12. It associates well, even on the sector antenna. Unfortunately, I can't seal the back connection because of the broken latch. My other, water-resistant modem I updated from v6.12 to v6.32.3. I did not do a full reset when updating the client configuration from the HamWAN website. I could not get this one to acquire an IP address from the network, even on the dish antenna. I went back to my hamshack (I was wet and tired and water was fritzing my laptop keyboard!). I reset and reloaded this modem to try again tomorrow. Does RouterOS firmware matter? When I put the sector antenna/modem into the tree I will use a rope on top from which to hang the combination antenna/modem, and two ropes at the bottom of the sector antenna (one on each left and right side) to steer the antenna. I have shielded, outdoor CAT6 cable (Ubiquity ToughCable Carrier) as a downlead. We're hams, we experiment! 73 from Dan at K7MM 509 330 6398

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Quarterly Board Call
by Nigel Vander Houwen 11 Jan '16

11 Jan '16

Hello All, It’s time once again for our quarterly board conference call. It’s scheduled for 6PM (18:00) Pacific, Monday December 28th. We’ll be using our standard conference line at 1-206-805-8861. The board members will meet to discuss the current state and vote on any decisions necessary for the org. Members are welcome to dial in and listen, and I make a point of asking for general feedback on things being discussed before the board makes a decision. If anyone has things they would like to have brought up on the agenda, please reach out to me and I’ll be sure to include them. We’ve currently got on the list: Consider refactoring the hamwan.org web site to be more reflective of the HamWAN community. Puget Sound has been the founding/flagship network, but we have very successful sisters, and the main landing page should be inclusive of them. Consider a new mailing list for work on progressing the HamWAN standard. This is currently extremely informal, and is driven mostly on IRC. Consider transitioning the psdr(a)hamwan.org mailing list to something more general like hamwan(a)hamwan.org <mailto:hamwan@hamwan.org>. As with the first point, HamWAN is a standard, and we have a community of sister networks and there should be a general discussion place not specific to Puget Sound. We’ve had some technical projects come along that have put IP space back in our minds. We’ve had a suggestion to request a /16 for Puget Sound from ARDC, rather than a more incremental increase in our allocation. This would give us quite a bit of room to grow, and we would seem to have some support from our local coordinator. As Puget Sound is the hub for some of our more ambitious projects like the Open Peering Policy, we may be able to have some weight behind this request, but it is a large chunk, that will require large reasons. Thanks, Nigel President HamWAN

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