Greetings all,
In order to cut down on the number of emails, I have combined those I know
who have agreed to stand for election into this initial email. If you are
a Supporting Member who wishes to also run for a Board position, PLEASE DO
by announcing your intention via the list in similar fashion to below. Rob
Salsgiver resigned from the board in November, but we have two new members
who have agreed to stand for election this cycle.
*Cory Johnson* has acted as our Treasurer/Secretary for a number of years,
and whose efforts have truly been invaluable. Cory handles the finances,
makes sure the taxes get filed, and the bills get paid. His help in this
area “behind the scenes” allows others to devote their time to the
technical and operational sides of the organization.
*Doug Kingston* (myself) has been heavily involved in most of the efforts
to upgrade the network as part of the NetOps group in addition to the
Board. He is also the HamWAN "Quartermaster" managing our inventory of
spares and sourcing new kit.
*Dylan Ambauen* has been with the organization several years as a
contributing member of the NetOps group assisting with troubleshooting and
regular maintenance, as well as participating in numerous site
commissioning and de-commissioning operations.
*Kenny Richards* has been a long-time member of NetOps team and has been
the primary contributor to the maintenance of several sites including Baldi
and Buck, as well as helping with many others.
*Juan Vasquez* – part of the NetOps group, avid climber, assisted with site
installations, maintenance, funding, and other items as needed.
The voting period for the 5 individuals above will conclude 7 days from
now. Supporting members, please reply in this thread with your Yea, Nay,
or Abstain votes. Remember that each individual is a separate election,
you do not have to choose one individual. You can vote for all or any
subset.
Thank you all for your consideration, and I hope to have the opportunity to
work with you further over the next year.
Supporting members (provided by Cory, our Treasurer) who are eligible to
vote as of 9 Dec 2025:
Alan Scott
Bob Edmiston
Burt Guillot
Casey R Hickerson
Cory Johnson
Dana Hanford
David Spencer
Doug Kingston
Dylan Ambauen
John C Miller
Juan Vasquez
Kenneth Koster
Kenny Richards
Nicholas Gerner
Nigel Vander Houwen
Randy Neals
Robert Salsgiver
Robert Sampson
Terence Chan
Tim Osburn
If you believe the above list is in error, please let us know. Supporting
member criteria can be found at https://hamwan
.org/Administrative/Constitution.html
-Doug-
As we come into December and the holiday season, I thought it would be good
to get a summary of activity this year out to the PSDR community. HamWAN is
thriving and continuing to grow despite the DNR setbacks a couple of years
ago.
*West Tiger Mountain* - The Boeing BEARS installed a full HamWAN cell site
at the company's facility on West Tiger Mt. HamWAN supported the project
with technical assistance but the project was funded by the BEARS and a
couple of other donors. The site is connected to the rest of PSDR via 2
10GHz links capable of 500Mbits, one to Ziply Fiber in Everett (our primary
internet connection point) and the other link to Capitol Park, which is
well connected in the Seattle area. HamWAN will operate the cell site and
its already attracting clients, some of whom were previously on East Tiger.
We thank the BEARS for making this possible.
*Baldi repairs *- Kenny with help from his son, replaced three CAT5 runs at
Baldi
- Beacon.Baldi PtP - bringing it back online
- Baldi S2 - was damaged at routing point due to stress
- Baldi PTZ Camera - was offline due to water damage
All of the replacement CAT5 runs were re-routed to hopefully minimize the
stress on the jackets. All three had failed due to water ingress where the
jackets had holes from rubbing against the tower. With the new CAT5 run,
also installed the new PTZ camera that had been removed due to damage/wear.
*New Monitoring System* - We installed a new monitoring system based on
Zabbix using the community edition of the commercial product
<http://zabbix.com/>. This has added a lot better visibility of HamWAN
system health. We still have some customization we want to accomplish (some
additional parameter collection, map updates, inventory export), before we
retire Cacti, but it's already been a great help. If you want to help with
this, please reach out to netops@.
*44.24.240.0/20 <http://44.24.240.0/20> returned *- On December 8th, we
returned our network allocation of 44.24.240.0/20 to ARDC. We are now fully
converted to our new network allocation, 44.25.0.0/16.
*Indianola Power Improvement* - Dana Hanford moved our Indianola systems
from AC power to the DC power bus, which is more resilient to failures.
*RouterOS Fleet Upgrade* - We upgraded all the HamWAN maintained devices to
RouterOS 7.x. At this point we can recommend this upgrade to all
PSDR/HamWAN users.
*Documentation Refresh* - Much of our online documentation has been updated
and new documentation added. We also added a new client config generator to
help make client configuration easier for users.
A special round of thanks to our climbers including Alan Scott AC7MX, Juan
Vasquez N7JMZ, and Kenny Richards KU7M who have done the bulk of our
climbing this year.
2026 is looks to be a good year as well with new sites coming online. More
on that when plans firm up.
Happy Holidays!
-Doug-
KD7DK
*on behalf of the HamWAN board*
The Dynadish is discontinued. This was a good client device. The
RBLHG-5HPnD-XL <https://mikrotik.com/product/RBLHG-5HPnD-XL> looks like the
replacement and is a beefed up version of the smaller RBLHG-5nd
<https://mikrotik.com/product/RBLHG-5nD>. Has anyone tested this device? If
not, I'll order one and test it out. The other single unit client device is
the QRT 5 panel which is still available.
-Doug-
