[HamWAN PSDR] VOTE: 900MHz service experiment

[John D. Hays]

Just as a point of reference, we tried a 900 Mhz  pTp link from East Gold
(WD7STR, now off the air) to WA7DAD's QTH.  It was about 22 miles, as I
recall, using yagi's at each end.

The band was surprisingly quiet on Gold and we would see 'blips' of
connectivity using lower bitrates (1 Mhz. as I remember).

Certainly worth a try.  It might even work between my QTH and Paine Field,
where 5.9 Ghz is unlikely.

On Fri, Mar 6, 2015 at 10:38 AM, Bart Kus <me at bartk.us> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> 5.9GHz is awesome when it works.  The speeds are great, and it carries as
> far as the eye can see with very low ambient noise floor.  It does however
> have problems when it needs to penetrate trees and buildings.  To alleviate
> this, I'd like HamWAN to offer a slower but deeper penetrating 900MHz
> service.  900MHz is the lowest frequency ham band without bandwidth or
> modulation rate restrictions.  Before we deploy a full cell site, I'd like
> to get some real-world experience with 900MHz penetration, propagation and
> ambient noise conditions.  Here's the cheapest appropriate hardware we can
> use for this:
>
> 1x Vpol omni antenna @ $79.50/ea = $79.50 (http://www.balticnetworks.
> com/laird-antenna-omni-8dbi-900mhz-n-female-integrated.html)
> 2x 9HPn modem @ $108.00/ea = $216.00 (http://www.balticnetworks.
> com/mikrotik-metal-9hpn.html)
> 1x Shipping @ $UNKNOWN (quote not showing?!  Need to call them.) = $40.00
> ???
>
> Total: $335.50
>
> I already have a 900MHz high gain Yagi-Uda in my inventory and can use
> that to do various field tests.  These can be directly compared against
> 5.9GHz performance since the gear will be deployed to one of our existing
> 5.9GHz cell sites.  The results of such comparisons will give us a good
> idea of how well 900MHz might do for HamWAN.
>
> Disclaimer: These may not be the right modems or antennas for us
> long-term.  A real deployment might use Ubiquiti Rocket M900 with their
> sector antennas.  These Ubiquiti items are far more expensive though, and
> their software doesn't integrate as easily into our network, so for the
> purposes of the test I believe the set of hardware I proposed will do well
> at deploying fast and keeping costs down.
>
> NOTE: If both the votes are approved, I will combine shipping from Baltic
> to save money.
>
> --Bart
>
> _______________________________________________
> PSDR mailing list
> PSDR at hamwan.org
> http://mail.hamwan.net/mailman/listinfo/psdr
>



-- 

------------------------------
John D. Hays
K7VE

PO Box 1223, Edmonds, WA 98020-1223
<http://k7ve.org/blog>  <http://twitter.com/#!/john_hays>
<http://www.facebook.com/john.d.hays>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.hamwan.net/pipermail/psdr/attachments/20150306/15e0a4ba/attachment-0001.html>