[HamWAN PSDR] Beacon Tower-Capital Park Backbone Link

[Randy Neals]

Hi,

I was digging through the HamWAN Map and Monitoring site to better
understand the connectivity and redundancy of the backbone supporting the
two key Seattle HamWAN sites, Beacon Tower and Capital Park.

To recap what I observed...
Documentation suggests *backbone connectivity at Capital Park* is:
a. PtP link to Baldi
b. PtP link to Paine

The Capital Park to Baldi PtP actually appears to be a Point-to-Multipoint
Link with 2 clients registered on the Baldi radio. I suspect that is
Capital Park and Beacon Tower sharing access to a single dish/radio at
Baldi.

The Capital Park to Paine PtP seems to be decommissioned.

*Question:* Am I correct in believing that Capital Park is single-threaded
with just one backbone connection to Baldi operational?

*Suggestion:*
I think it might be prudent to have a direct PtP link between Capital Park
and Beacon Tower.
The sites are 4km apart with good visual line of sight. These two sites are
very important to Seattle users.

*Proposal:*
24 GHz is both an Amateur Radio band, and an ISM unlicensed band.
This band works very well on short point to point paths. Further, 24.05 to
24.25 is an ISM band and can carry commercial traffic or amateur traffic.

24 GHz could be utilized on the Beacon Tower to Seattle EOC link.
This link is very short (1.1 Miles/1.7 Km) and is a really good use case
for 24 GHz.

Equipment for 24Ghz is not particularly expensive.
Mimosa announced a new B24 model on March 6 that has a $729 per end cost
for integrated dish/radio. https://mimosa.co/products/specs/b24

Using 24 GHz to the EOC would allow the repurposing of the 5GHz link
intended as Beacon-EOC to be a new backbone path Beacon Tower to Capital
Park. I believe there is ample room at Capital Park to add a 2' dish
pointing at Beacon. This path is about 4km and would not be suitable for 24
Ghz.

The outcome of this proposal would be:
1. Seattle EOC-Beacon being linked at very high speed over 24 GHz. (circa 1
Gb/s)
2. Beacon Tower-Capital Park also having a high speed 5GHz backbone (circa
100 Mb/s)

These key sites in Seattle would be less reliant on Gold, Baldi, and
Haystack for connectivity within the City of Seattle/across town.

There is an obvious cost implication for this change, but it's not
particularly large and could make the network more robust. I'd be willing
to contribute to this and others may also also do the same.

Thanks for reading this and considering it.
Randy
W3RWN
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