Hi Tom,
Well, you have been busy! Thank you for looking into these things -- I know it can take a while sifting through the possibilities.
My "stick in the ground" model that I've been presently mulling is a "hub-and-spoke" sort of setup -- at least from a theoretical point of view because it sure doesn't resemble one on paper! (Owing to the geography of course...)
Core triangle of 12, 13, and 17 for reasons stated earlier -- UNLESS one of the other stations ends up having a "better" link
Station 14 would hang off 12 (and possibly have a HamWAN link as well as it surprisingly has a possible shot at it)
Station 16 would likely hang off 13 (and/or possibly) -- station 11 would have to hang off 16 (so having a redundant link to 16 would be worth considering)
Station 18 is potentially a challenge, but might have a shot at 12 (and maybe HamWAN as well as you point out)
Anyway, we need to get on the roofs and "see what we can see" to get a better idea.
As an aid for this, I made a little "telescoping mast" out of some PVC pipe that I can put my phone on and hoist up 15 feet or so using a rope (from wherever I'm standing). (It's a Windows phone, so it's expendable. :-) I use it to first take a short 360 video. Once I have an idea of a potentially promising direction, I use a timer for taking a higher-resolution picture that I can study in more detail. The other day I was pleasantly surprised that I might very well have a good shot at station 16 from our home where there is a relatively convenient mounting point. (For testing convenience as it's a nice 3 km+ path.) Anyway, it was nice not having to drag out the extension ladder. :-) So, it may be helpful for scoping things out at the stations; we'll see. If any of you have ideas for simple site surveying, I'd love to hear them.
I don't know how this is all going to play out, but several folks on the ARES team are excited by the prospects and having some more hard data from a survey will definitely kick up the energy level I'm sure. :-) We're still kicking around ideas on what to do for inter-station linking; it can get expen$ive in a hurry... Has anybody here played with 2.4 GHz amps and dishes? They are relatively inexpensive and the choices for routers to use are plentiful and inexpensive as well... One of the ARES guys and I achieved (more or less) a 1.5 km link using Linksys routers with dd-wrt and only 70 mW into DIY helical antennas on flimsy tripods! It wasn't super-stable, but for only 70 mW, I thought it wasn't too bad...