[HamWAN PSDR] Results of fund drive to raise $1500 for cell site

[Bart Kus]

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

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