Several of the points that Rob brought up really ring true to me.  I'm not a core member of this group, but I've been encouraged by what has been accomplished and I'm trying to assist where possible. (I even bought all the equipment and spent several days on the roof of my house and at the top of my tower trying to get online)

When I look at the node map, I see only a few people who have managed to connect to the system. They are all what I'd consider 'core members' of HamWAN.  I would consider this typical, but it isn't something the typical ham is going to consider encouraging. (Why are there so few users? Is it to difficult to get online? Is it really expensive? Who am I going to talk to, nobody I know is on there?)  

I believe getting your next 10 users on the air should be a goal for the group. Try to make these next 10 users spread out across the coverage area and hopefully connected to different ham radio groups.  These 10 people will drive your next 50 users would be my guess. At that point people will start feeling like they should contribute to the cost of the system.

The nice thing is that getting users online shouldn't require access to mountain tops or climbing towers during the winter. Hopefully it is a low cost activity, maybe only requiring some loaner equipment or something to confirm the users can get online.

And I know someone who is on the board of the WWARA, which handles repeater coordinations....

Just my two cents....

73,
Kenny  


On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Tom Hayward <esarfl@gmail.com> wrote:
I'll take a stab at a few of these points and defer the others...

On Thu, Oct 3, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Rob Salsgiver <rob@quailsoftltd.net> wrote:
> 2)      End-users (individual):  We need to get more of our core online and
> well versed in the system.  From those early users we need a few in each
> county or metro area that are willing to do site surveys and interact with
> other potential end users to get them onboard.  We need to focus on our
> marketing, getting the message out (with success stories), and more end-user
> demonstrations – not just the equipment, but from an application standpoint.

I'll come out and do a site survey anywhere in Pierce County.

I'll run a custom propagation model for anyone anywhere. This will
tell you how tall of a tower you need to get HamWAN. HamWAN covers
everything within 100 miles of a site if you have a tall enough tower
;-)

> 3)      End-users (EMCOMM):  We need some served agencies online.  We need
> advocates outside of the ham world.  Hospitals, Red Cross, Emergency
> Management offices, Salvation Army, maybe even a mobile station.  If we have
> 3-4 hospitals, Red Cross chapters, or similar served agencies successfully
> hooked up, we have a working demonstration platform to work from.  Even
> then, basic connectivity isn’t.  We need hams in these locations to
> demonstrate on an applications basis what can be done “when all else fails”
> over HamWAN.  If we can convince 30-50 different served agencies to shell
> out the cost of a single cell phone each month to support a dedicated
> Internet connection that is disaster-resilient, then you have up to
> $2500/month coming in to support the infrastructure.  Demonstrate email, web
> access, and maybe even some specialized goodies targeted at them – use
> D-RATs for a tactical “chat” interface between locations – who knows?  Maybe
> interface with other digital gateways or extend over other RF links
> (D-Star?).

The Snohomish County EOC is online with HamWAN. I'd like to see other
EOCs come online, but we don't have contacts there. HamWAN could be
very useful for EOC-to-EOC communications (sending video, phone,
etc.).

If you have contacts in the EmComm world, talk to them! Or see if we
can schedule a presentation.

Heh, D-Rats is a patch to make D-Star useful. We can just show them
email, "Look, you can still use Outlook!" Service decoupled from
network: awesome.

I don't see Internet as the end goal of HamWAN. HamWAN can facilitate
communications between hams. EOC-to-EOC communication can take place
completely over the HamWAN RF network, until a hole opens up in the
earth and swallows one of our sites. Then we just route around the
outage with Internet; communication continues.

Tom KD7LXL

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