Thanks Nigel.  I can nose around about Cougar.  Do you know what the issue(s) is(are)?  There are several ham repeaters there of course.

As for locations.  These are the fire station addresses and GPS coordinates that one of our other members put together:

Station Address City Zip Lat/Long
11 - HQ  8450 161ST AVE NE REDMOND 98052-3848 47.677913, -122.124938
12 4211 148TH AVE NE  BELLEVUE 98007-3119 47.648426, -122.143646
13 8701 208TH AVE NE REDMOND 98053 47.680206, -122.063499
14 5021 264TH AVE NE REDMOND 98053-2718 47.651962, -121.987793
16 6502 185TH AVE NE REDMOND 98052-5039 47.664105, -122.093651
17 16917 NE 116TH ST REDMOND 98052-2246 47.703403, -122.114135
18 22710 NE ALDERCREST DR REDMOND 98053-5845 47.692245, -122.03717

My thinking is to have a "core network" of links between stations 12, 13, and 17.  Of all the stations, 13 seemed to be the most promising.  Station 12 is practically next door to Microsoft's main campus and the noise level is huge there, but it potentially has great shots to several other stations which makes it attractive to having in the core.  Station 17 has become somewhat of a "hub" station for ARES -- at least we continue moving in that direction; trees could be an issue there.  One or two of the other stations might have coverage potential, but it's all showing even more spotty on the map than these others.  (Of course if we were able to access a node on Cougar, everything changes for the better...)

In terms of height, there are a number of factors that may limit us, BUT the fire stations have "hose towers" (for hanging hoses to dry after use) which are pretty tall.  I think 20 - 30 feet might be doable.  The lower the better from a "political" point of view, the higher the better from a "technical" point of view.  ;-)

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

(I have been using the ubnt.com/airlink site for doing some of this analysis as well as some other tools.  A recent test we did seemed to confirm its validity although it was a bit optimistic -- that is, leaning more towards the "theoretical" which isn't surprising.)


On Sun, Mar 6, 2016 at 3:48 PM, Nigel Vander Houwen <nigel@nigelvh.com> wrote:
Howdy Ed,

RE #1: Do you have the GPS coordinates and how high the antennas would end up being? If so, we can look at the models and see what they look like.

RE #2: We have gear on East Tiger, but Cougar is pretty much out. Cougar would be a nice site to add, but us, and several others on our behalf, have never been able to get site owner buy in. If you’re able to push that forward, we’d be happy to work with you on that.

Nigel


On Mar 6, 2016, at 15:43, Ed Morin <edmorin.jr@gmail.com> wrote:

I replied to Dan who encouraged me to post to the list, so here I am.  :-)

I am part of the City of Redmond ARES group and we are working towards implementing a HamWAN link to a city network we hope to put together.  We were allocated a /24 network and our intentions are to (eventually) multi-home for redundancy as well as provide AP's locally (for ham use).  

Anyway, I was intrigued by two things Dan noted in his post which he thought others on the list might have some ideas they could share.

1. The Redmond area -- particularly where our fire stations are -- is very spotty in terms of coverage as it appears on the homepage coverage map.  We would love it if somebody could help in determining what our "real" chances are for getting HamWAN links at a few of our fire stations.  I have studied the coverage map on the homepage, but I assume it's not "perfect" when coverage is showing "spotty" (particularly in the Redmond area).  We're looking to get an end-user "setup" to use for "surveying" with, but do not have that yet since it would be out of our own pockets until we can demonstrate a proof-of-concept to the city (after which we could likely get reimbursed).  My present thinking is that fire stations 13 and 17 are possible candidates although (if memory serves) there are two others that may have a shot at it as well.  So, any ideas on how we could work to nail that down would be great.  If somebody has a "portable" unit, maybe we could just try it sometime to see if a signal is visible...

2. Putting a core node on Tiger Mt. might be potentially very helpful to us.  A node on Cougar Mt. might be even more so; have any of you looked into that possibility?  It appears to have better Eastside coverage than Tiger and a better "view" of Redmond up the Sammamish valley.  This might be attractive to the Microsoft / MicroHams crowd...

Again, any thoughts you have on this would be appreciated...

Thanks,

-Ed
(WB7UBD)


-Ed
(WB7UBD)
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