Fri, 27 Jan 2006

Tower Project Complete

As you may remember, SeattleWireless embarked on a tower node project in the start of december. I am happy to report that this project is now complete. The gear is on top of the UPN tower on Capitol Hill and is fully operational. The ESSID is "SWN-NodeAtoys", and is currently a 6dBi omni antenna. The UPN tower is the southwestern tower on top of madison.

NodeAtoys, on top of the UPN tower, runs DHCP, OLSR (a mesh routing protocol), and is available to anyone who wants to connect. I highly suggest a high gain directional antenna, as it will take a little bit more power than normal to light up this small omni. This was actually done on purpose to reduce the heavy amounts of interference in seattle area. 2.4GHz is a jungle, as you probably guessed.

Inital surveys using Kismet indicated that we are pulling in a couple of stray signals. One of the most interesting is a signal originating from an antenna located at a marina at the base of Magnolia. A non-directional antenna not really pointing at our tower that is several miles away (line of sight) is a very good sign that things are going to be great for people in the Seattle area who can see this tower.

I was not able to make it out today for the install, but check out Matt Westervelt's Blog for more details. Also, check out the NodeAtoys wiki page for official node-related information.

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