[HamWAN PSDR] Beacon Tower-Capital Park Backbone Link

[Tom Hayward]

Randy,

Capitol Park also links to Queen Anne, which links to Haystack, so it's not
single-homed. That said, there's a lot that could be improved at Capitol
Park. It has traditionally been hard to get access to, so it doesn't get
much love.

We've never done any 24 GHz, and $1458 is a lot to spend on one link. We've
also never done any non-Mikrotik gear. A consistent OS makes writing
configuration automation a lot easier. Change is hard.

I agree with Bryan's point that I don't want to support a company lobbying
to take 10 GHz away from hams. I took a quick look and other 24 GHz gear
appears to be about twice as expensive. Hmm.

There's a lot of broken stuff right now, so my priorities for the next few
months will be helping with repairs rather than improvements. And East
Tiger is now single-homed, so it would be nice to find something for it to
connect to in the SW direction.

Sorry for the lack of depth. Busy week.

Tom

On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 1:41 AM, Randy Neals <randy at neals.ca> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> PSDR mailing list
> PSDR at hamwan.org
> http://mail.hamwan.net/mailman/listinfo/psdr
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.hamwan.net/pipermail/psdr/attachments/20180328/f35ae5f4/attachment.html>