Hello, It's been a week since I've called on everyone to help raise enough funds to order replacement hardware for the site that was deployed so that we can keep deploying. The results are in, and this week we've raised: *$120* Three people stepped up to make this happen, and I thank each of you. Sadly this is only 8% of what is required to keep us going here. It's almost summer time, the mountain top sites are melting and finally becoming accessible. In the next 3-5 months we will face our largest growth period to date as a result. We will need to keep plenty of hardware in stock to deploy to these sites as they open up. We must not miss this summer's window of opportunity. That is exactly how projects die forever. There are 50 people on this mailing list. I would like to ask each of you to look at your monthly Internet bill and donate just ONE month towards creating the network. We are funneling the money 100% into hardware, and have not (amazingly!) entered into any recurring cost situations. This is a one-time investment which will pay off for years. I estimate the average person's Internet bill to be $60/mo. If everyone donated just that we'd raise $3000 and be able to deploy 2 more cell sites from just that 1 round of funding! Remember, these sites serve huge land areas, not like typical mobile phone cell sites. By month's end I'll publish the coverage models for the 2 sites coming online right now, after they're fully configured. I was really (pleasantly) surprised when I saw the models one of the project engineers did (thanks Tom!). If you'd like to help in beta testing the sites as they're being built, come join us on freenode in the #HamWAN channel. It's been quite active lately. If you have suggestions for how to improve fundraising, I'd love to hear them too. (on-list is fine) --Bart