How far below the Fresnel zone(s) are you when you're on the golf course?

 

73, Daniel K7DGL

On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 1:00 PM, Kenny Richards <richark@gmail.com> wrote:

Since the weather decided to not suck this morning, I did a quick 'site survey' from the Newcastle Golf Course parking lot. (N 47.53602, W 122.14272 @ 919 feet)

I have attempted to get connected from my house several times, but haven't had any success. Before going back up on the tower, I wanted to try connecting from what I expected to be a REALLY good location.  I'm only about a mile as the crow flies the Newcastle Golf course, so it is my go to place for this kind of thing.(I'm about 500 feet lower though) From the edge of the golf course parking lot you can see all of downtown, right over the top of Mercer Island. (See attached picture)

So I had expected to connect to the PtP link at Capital Park without any problems, since I can SEE the damn building from up there. But nope, still no luck. I was able to see two other sites and associate with them. I knew there was a node going up on Haystack, but I was surprised how easy it was to connect to it.  What I really don't get is how I was seeing AE7SJ's home link. Isn't it pointed at DEM?  (Or is AE7SJ something else?)

I also discovered something else that confuses me. I saw thayward@ use the LED signal indicators on the radio a couple weeks ago. But this afternoon, I never got even one bar. Do you have to enable them before they work? (I'll have to dig into the docs on this one)  I would assume at least one bar would light up with these signal strengths, right? 

So my next step is taking a trip downtown with the portable setup and see if I can find a spot semi-close to Capital Park and try to connect. My gut is telling me that something is fundamentally wrong with the PtP link or how I have things setup on my end. The golf course isn't 'exactly' in between downtown and the Cougar Mnt site, but it is really close. So if this link is going to work as it was intended, I should have been able to connect from up there.

I also attached the config dump from the radio.

Thoughts?

Kenny

Output from Scan...

Flags: A - active, P - privacy, R - routeros-network, N - nstreme, T - tdma, W - wds, B - bridge 

ADDRESS           SSID                  BAND           CHANNEL-WIDTH FREQ SIG   NF   SNR RADIO-NAME           

A RT   D4:CA:6D:62:D7:ED HamWAN       5ghz-n 5mhz          5890           -88  -117  29 Haystack-S3/AE7SJ     

APRT   00:0C:42:E0:4F:AC HamWAN       5ghz-n 10mhz         5475           -87  -117  30 AE7SJ    

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