mattw.fn_blog()

Peter Yorke and I made a trek up to mt. baldi today, along with Scott
Cronk. Mike Pierce was down on the optic fusion building in tacoma with
a 24dBi parabolic for alignment purposes. The weather was awesome on the
mountain, and we have a few pictures. The snow has completely melted,
making vehicle access possible.

We successfully accomplished the following:

• Moved soekris to waterproof enclosure on top of tower
• Placed donated RG1000 in enclosure for future use (mt. rainier client
  access and eastern washington link test purposes)

• Placed tacoma facing radio for linking into downtown tacoma, radio configured and online. Aligned antenna with Tacoma test radios.

The tower mounting is very exciting because we were able to eliminate
50-60 feet of LMR-400 in exchange for just using a couple of pigtails.
This cuts our signal losses drastically.

The next steps will be to move the seattle facing antenna up to the tower
on our next trip, and install a permanent facility on the building in
tacoma this next coming week. We also will probably obtain a 24dBi
parabolic for mt. rainier facing as well as eastern washington facing for
link tests. There are also some fun items going into the mt. baldi site.

As soon as a few minor building facility items are addressed in tacoma
(work in progress) we should have network connectivity between
TacomaBaldi very shortly. A client radio is being placed in Tacoma
(TacomaNode) for all those in range for end-user usage.

Its been a long 6 months, but we are slowly making progress on
introducing the first piece of snownet for general SWN usage! Just one
wireless hop (router) to tacoma from seattle. Hopefully more fun hops
soon.

Exciting times ahead! More updates at the meeting - be sure to attend!