May 2018 - PSDR - mailman.hamwan.org

HamWan 900 MHz
by Stan 23 May '19

23 May '19

if this is up and running, I'd sure like to buy a 900 Mhz modem and get the HamWan a bit farther into Mason County. Any suggestions? -- Stan KF7LTT Spams/Scams Forwarded To WA State Attorney For Prosecution.

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CapitolPark <-> QueenAnne link
by Bart Kus 19 Apr '19

19 Apr '19

After hours of debugging, I got this 20MHz single-polarity link moving up to 55Mbit. A high resolution spectrum analysis on both sides did indeed show a better frequency to use for the link. Spectrum analysis captures here: https://imgur.com/a/4H7GB There was also an IP conflict between two modems @ Capitol Park. The conflicting IP has been removed from CapitolPark-S3. The QueenAnne modem used for the link is not one used anywhere else on the network. It's a very low-end modem, and as a result it was having CPU/RAM starvation issues when running our regular diagnostic tools, which lead to out-of-memory conditions and kernel crashes. A different test methodology had to be used to verify the link speed (testing through the modem, instead of to the modem). The modem that links QueenAnne with the Westin building (on the QueenAnne side) had a mis-configured OSPF router-id. This was fixed. I'm still seeing weird routing decisions being made by OSPF. These are triggered by our point-to-point route entries (44.24.242.0/24 space). More research needs to be done here, and perhaps a re-write of how we define point-to-point interface addresses. Any OSPF experts in the house? I also discovered R1.QueenAnne was still vulnerable to hacking due to a mis-configuration of its control software. It missed the updates that were sent out to the whole network. This has been fixed now. R1.QueenAnne also didn't have the diagnostic bandwidth-server setup correctly. This was fixed. With the CapitolPark-QueenAnne link performing well now: [eo@CapitolPark-QueenAnne] /system resource> /tool bandwidth-test 44.24.241.81 direction=both status: running duration: 57s tx-current: 28.0Mbps tx-10-second-average: 28.4Mbps tx-total-average: 27.5Mbps rx-current: 27.6Mbps rx-10-second-average: 28.0Mbps rx-total-average: 27.0Mbps lost-packets: 288 random-data: no direction: both tx-size: 1500 rx-size: 1500 its OSPF config has been reset to a normal preference level, so that packets no longer try to avoid that link as they are routed through the network. This link can be sped up by upgrading to a dual-polarity modem @ CapitolPark. While testing if the OSPF hop cost was being calculated correctly in the Beacon-Haystack-QueenAnne RF link (they both connect to the same dish @ Haystack), I discovered a mis-config on the Haystack.Beacon modem (bad LAN IP binding) which was preventing it from bringing up OSPF on its LAN interface. This was fixed and that modem should act like an actual router now, moving traffic. During the same Beacon testing, I was reminded that our Baldi-Beacon RF link sucks <https://monitoring.hamwan.net/cacti/graph.php?action=view&local_graph_id=91…>. It was optimized for speed to Tukwila, which is now gone, so a trip needs to be scheduled to Baldi to rotate the dish a few degrees north and get that link going strong. I normally wouldn't send this kind of verbose email to psdr@, but I hope it's illuminating as to the type and extent of work required to keep this network running well. --Bart

4 6

VOTE: Larch Mtn
by Tom Hayward 14 Jun '18

14 Jun '18

It's shaping up to be a busy summer for HamWAN in the Puget Sound region! We have many repairs to do (watch for emails to volunteer), and if things go well we will have multiple new sites coming online. Here is the first funding request for a new site, Larch Mountain. Rob and Loren have invited HamWAN to Larch to connect their DMR repeaters. This is also a strategic location and milestone for HamWAN: it will allow us to link the Seattle and Portland metro areas. Larch will connect to Baw Faw via point-to-point dish and cover the Portland area with a sector. Here is the full bill of materials. It's a little different than typical because for the long shot to Baw Faw we plan to repurpose an unused 3ft dish from Baldi. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ls3196YzkcZ9JgNPIvrzyQUjhAAn-CMa31p… Vendor Description Price Qty Subtotal Notes Alternative Backhaul dish HamWAN ARC-DA5830SD1 <https://reseller.streakwave.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=ARC-DA5830SD1&eq=&Tp=&o1=0> $117.89 0 $0.00 Reuse 3ft dish from Baldi RF Armor ARC WIRELESS A34RD5X <https://www.rfarmor.com/index.php/dish-kits/a34rd5x.html> $170.00 1 $170.00 Add shielding HamWAN ACRPSMA <https://reseller.streakwave.com/Itemdesc.asp?ic=ACRPSMA&eq=&Tp=> $8.00 0 $0.00 From Tukwila HamWAN HW-AD-NMRSF <https://www.streakwave.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=HW-AD-NMRSF&eq=&Tp=&o1=0> $4.50 0 $0.00 From Tukwila HamWAN RB921UAGS-5SHPacD-NM Modem (Free Ship) <https://smile.amazon.com/MikroTik-RB922UAGS-5HPacD-NM-NetMetal-integrated-8…> $138.00 0 $0.00 From Tukwila User access sector Baltic Networks AM-5G19-120 Sector Antenna <https://www.balticnetworks.com/ubiquiti-120deg-sector-antenna-and-rf-shield…> $116.00 1 $116.00 Baltic Networks Maxxwave Shield <https://www.balticnetworks.com/ubiquiti-120deg-sector-antenna-and-rf-shield…> $49.50 1 $49.50 Streakwave RB912UAG-5HPnD Modem PCB <https://reseller.streakwave.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=RB912UAG-5HPnD&eq=&Tp=&o1=0> $67.00 1 $67.00 Streakwave SBX-S-CC-2SMA PCB Enclosure <https://reseller.streakwave.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=SBX-S-CC&eq=&Tp=&o1=0> $25.65 1 $25.65 Indoor Equipment Baltic Networks MikroTik RB2011 ethernet switch <https://www.balticnetworks.com/mikrotik-routerboard-rb2011uias-rm-complete-…> $99.25 1 $99.25 Needed to connect more than once device. Baltic Networks RBmAPL-2nD WiFi Access Point <https://www.balticnetworks.com/mikrotik-map-lite-2-4ghz-magnetic-dual-chain…> $21.25 1 $21.25 Optional, allows wifi access on site Nigel K7NVH PoE PDU $231.03 1 $231.03 Alternative: Mikrotik Gigabit PoE injectors (wall wart) with AP7900 or similar PDU Cable Management SitePro1 BC1410 (10pk) barrel cushions <https://www.sitepro1.com/store/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=2301> $26.95 4 $107.80 SitePro1 158SS-A (10pk) stackable snap-in hangers <https://www.sitepro1.com/store/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=13> $17.95 4 $71.80 Ensure tower is compatible or order alternative hangers SitePro1 ADAP-O (10pk) Angle Adapters for Snap-Ins <https://www.sitepro1.com/store/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=37> $30.95 1 $30.95 SitePro1 SitePro1 shipping $30.00 1 $30.00 ESTIMATE Cable and Connectors HamWAN TC-Con-100 100 shielded RJ-45 connectors <https://reseller.streakwave.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=TC-Con-100A> $45.59 0.1 $4.56 HamWAN TC-Pro (Free Ship) 1000 ft <https://smile.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Networks-TOUGHCable-TC-PRO-Shielded/dp/B0…> $135.00 0.2 $27.00 Misc Streakwave Shipping $30.00 1 $30.00 ISP Supplies Shipping 1 $0.00 Baltic Networks Shipping $30.00 1 $30.00 RF Armor Shipping $20.00 1 $20.00 Subtotal $1,131.79 Sales Tax Estimate $1,131.79 10.0% $113.18 GRAND TOTAL $1,244.97 HamWAN board, please submit your votes to approve funding this buildout. Tom KD7LXL

3 4

Site-line question
by Roy Harkness 20 May '18

20 May '18

Hello, I'm looking for a check from the hamwan community. I believe I have good site-lines to Tiger Mountain where I see two sets of antennas (picture attached, looking south-south east from where I live in Sammamish near Pine Lake taken from my roof). Which (if any) is where the hamwan sector antenna is located for the East Tiger site? Thanks for your help! -- -Roy Harkness KI7QBA

2 1

SnoDEM sector misalignment
by Bart Kus 16 May '18

16 May '18

Hello, If you're a user of SnoDEM sectors, please note that we've received multiple reports of low signal strength. I believe this is caused by not doing a proper vertical alignment of the sector antennas when they were replaced on the 12th. We will book a follow-up trip for SnoDEM and this will be one of the work items to fix. If you're able, please leave your client connected to SnoDEM so that we have a reference signal to optimize when we're doing tilt adjustment. --Bart

1 0

Haystack work party
by Tom Hayward 14 May '18

14 May '18

Haystack-S1 and Haystack-S3 have been down for most of the winter. Bart has traditionally maintained this site, but has indicated that he does not have time to make a trip to replace them. The current impediments are snow on the road and willing and able volunteers. Bart can arrange for access (keys) to the site. HamWAN is looking for: 1) A project manager to coordinate this project 2a) Volunteers capable of snow travel 2b) Or, wait until the road thaws out, any volunteers capable of standing on a ladder and swapping out a modem/antenna Tom

7 11

Board Director Elections
by Nigel Vander Houwen 13 May '18

13 May '18

Hello Everyone, It’s been a year since our current board members were elected, so it’s time for new elections. As a quick recap for folks that haven’t been around, or need a reminder: Board member positions last for one year. Any supporting member is eligible to vote for board members. Any supporting member is eligible to run for a position on the board. There is no limit on the number of board members, so if you want to run and participate, you’re not taking a spot away from anyone else. There is a minimum number of 3 board members. Supporting members are those who have contributed at the Basic level ($20/mo) (or more) for the last 6 months. Voting is open for 7 days. Each board member is a separate “election”, IE you don’t have to choose one person to vote for, you choose Yay or Nay for all individuals. Please respond to the list with your votes, the list serves as our public record. Here’s our current list of supporting members (the folks who are eligible to vote on directors, or run for director themselves): Terence Chan Clifton Gurlen Nigel Vander Houwen Jim Hudspeth Cory Johnson Kenneth Koster Bart Kus Randy Neals Kenny Richards Robert Salsgiver Mark Sheppard Mike Shirley Lynn Speed Ryan Turner David Yost I’d also like to thank the following folks for their contributions, but have not yet met the minimum requirements to be an official “Supporting Member” according to our constitution: Bob Edmiston Carl Leon I’d like to thank all of the above folks for supporting HamWAN and our ability to purchase gear to expand the network and provide services to users. We’ve been very fortunate in our ability to keep overhead low, so we can put as much as possible into things that directly improve the network. We’ve seen a lot of great progress over the past year, not to mention a number of new users on the network, including a lot of interest from the local ACS folks. Here’s a small sampling of some of the things accomplished over the past year. The new cell site at Beacon was brought online, and has enabled a number of users to connect. Our “Open Peering Policy” project saw new users, as well as a feature improvement to allow dynamic IPs The new site at Baw Faw was brought online. The Haystack site saw significant restructuring of the power system to avoid the outages we had last winter. It’s been working great this winter! Baldi has been improved with a large battery bank to keep it running during outages. Our sister networks all over have seen great progress, Spokane, Tampa Bay, Interior BC and more. Capitol Park saw the addition of a bit of battery backup capacity, and some better optimized antenna aim on one of the backhaul links. We’ve also seen some damage over the winter, that we’re working to repair. Gold has been intermittent due to what we suspect is a faulty PDU. We have a new PDU, and some batteries to give the site some backup power ready. I expect the trip up will be happening soon. Sector 3 on Haystack which covers a lot of the populated areas died this winter. We’ve got a replacement on standby for when the snow clears enough for us to get up there to replace it. Our sponsorship with a local datacenter provider at Tukwila ended this year. It was a nice setup where we could announce to the internet at large, and had RF links that provided extra redundancy to Baldi and East Tiger. We thank them for their donated services over the last three years, and we’ll be working to find replacements soon to add back that redundancy. All of these things and more have been the results of massive efforts of a whole lot of people this year. Thanks to every one of you for making this happen. Whether your contribution was in time onsite tightening bolts, or with a few dollars that helps us buy new modems and dishes, it’s all been valued. Thank you. So, to the final point. It’s time to vote again on the board directors. For the past year Bart Kus, Cory Johnson, Ryan Turner, and myself have acted as the board for HamWAN. I have appreciated their work over the past year, and if they choose, I hope to continue doing so this year. Cory Johnson - Cory has graciously handled HamWAN’s financial and legal filings and reports. I’m incredibly grateful for his efforts. Thank you Cory! Bart Kus - Bart continues to put enormous effort into the physical aspects of the network, acquiring new sites, installing and maintaining them, as well as some software projects, as well as acting as an administrator for the Puget Sound network day to day. Thank you Bart! Ryan Turner - Ryan heads our sister network in Memphis. Thank you Ryan! Nigel Vander Houwen - (me) I handle much of our contract work, and record keeping around technical aspects like LoAs, I serve as a day to day network administrator, and have helped deploy and maintain some of the on-network services, occasionally I manage to make a site visit to help out, and I handle things like the email you’re reading now. For anyone who wishes to run for the board, please send an email to the mailing list announcing your intention to run (You’ll see mine momentarily as an example). The voting period on your election will end 7 days after your announcement. Duties are not time intensive, and mostly consist of being available for occasional calls to approve expenses, and assisting HamWAN in whichever ways your time and/or skills/knowledge allow. Thank you all for reading this rather long email, and I hope to work with you all here in this next year. Nigel Vander Houwen

4 8

SnoDEM status report
by Bart Kus 13 May '18

13 May '18

I'd like to thank everyone who showed up yesterday for the SnoDEM repair + upgrade work. It was great to see such a big turnout! The ground crew did a great job, and kept both the climbers busy throughout the day with no stalls of work up on the tower! The pre-work before deploy day (cutting CAT5 to length, pre-terminating ends, color-coding the cables, partially assembling the shields, pre-assembing the Lookout dish) saved so much time on the day. So a BIG thanks to the few who did this extra task to help make the day a success! Here's what we managed to do: 1. Upgraded all sectors to MIMO units, which roughly doubles their data rate. 2. Upgraded all sectors with shields, to minimize crosstalk and maximize throughput. 3. Installed the shielded + MIMO Lookout Mtn dish for that upcoming site link. 4. Upgraded the Haystack dish with a shield to minimize crosstalk. 5. Replaced ALL the HamWAN cabling on the tower, and secured it with proper tower cushions / hangers. No more zip ties that fail! We didn't manage to hit 100% of our goals for the day however. Here's what remains to be done: 1. Gold dish still has a broken modem, and needs a shield. 2. ETiger dish still needs a shield. 3. "Bruce" dish (no current link, but maybe later this summer) still needs a shield AND MIMO modem upgrade. 4. Cable ladder is missing several cable cushion tie points that need to be installed. My estimate for the speed of cable installation with proper cushion hardware was way too low. This had a few root causes: 1. I missed the presence of cross-arms all around the tower that prevented direct access to the cable ladder by newly hoisted cables. 2. The general strategy probably had some flaws: 1. It called for the hauling of CAT5 in 4-cable bundles to each of 2 heights on the tower. I figured this would save time by having fewer hauling trips up the tower. It turns out the ground crew was really fast at hauling, and that I was really slow at anchoring and routing the cable, and even slower when I realized I had pulled way too much excess cable up and had to push everything backwards to achieve proper lengths. It probably would have been faster to haul up 1 cable at a time, set it to the correct length for its destination modem, and install the cushions on it. 2. I split the 2 climbers into 2 teams so each could work on independent stuff concurrently at different heights on the tower. While this made some sense, I suspect a greater speed boost would have been achieved had the climbers been on the same level most of the time. I spent a bunch of time in tying things off just to move around, whereas a 2nd set of hands could have easily held something instead. There were plenty of concurrency opportunities at each level, where each climber could have taken on the installation of each modem, or splitting work up between cable routing and dish replacement, etc. On the plus side, the time estimates for the ease of sector + dish replacement / installation were pretty spot on. If you have any further insights into what went well or poorly, let's discuss it on the deploy@ mailing list. I only included psdr@ as CC to let people know the status of SnoDEM, so please remove it from your replies. I'll be reaching out to our climbers to see when we might schedule the follow-up visit to finish the work @ SnoDEM. And again, big thanks to everyone who helped! Couldn't be done without you. --Bart

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Re: [HamWAN PSDR] VOTE: 3 modems for SnoDEM
by Doug Kingston 09 May '18

09 May '18

Yay. On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 6:32 PM, rob <rob(a)nr3o.com> wrote: > > Yay. I'll drop some $$ into the account tonight or tomorrow when I get > home. > > On May 8, 2018 at 5:45 PM, <Bart Kus <me(a)bartk.us>> wrote: > > Looks like SnoDEM's shipment of modems won't arrive in time for the > Saturday repair mission. This is a vote to order 3 modems via 2nd day > air, which should let them arrive on Friday. The total is $440.85 > including shipping. > > We'll take possession of SnoDEM's modems when they show up on Monday and > hold onto them for future site work. > > My vote is yay. > > --Bart > > _______________________________________________ > PSDR mailing listPSDR@hamwan.orghttp://mail.hamwan.net/mailman/listinfo/psdr > > > > _______________________________________________ > PSDR mailing list > PSDR(a)hamwan.org > http://mail.hamwan.net/mailman/listinfo/psdr > >

1 0

VOTE: 3 modems for SnoDEM
by Bart Kus 08 May '18

08 May '18

Looks like SnoDEM's shipment of modems won't arrive in time for the Saturday repair mission. This is a vote to order 3 modems via 2nd day air, which should let them arrive on Friday. The total is $440.85 including shipping. We'll take possession of SnoDEM's modems when they show up on Monday and hold onto them for future site work. My vote is yay. --Bart

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