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<html><head></head><body><div style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri,sans-serif;"><div>I'd be interested in experimenting with 900 mhz gear at my Spanaway residence, and possibly at my Graham Hill repeater site. I believe 900 mhz would provide better overall results than 5 Ghz, which proved to be marginal to barely usable during our recent site survey.</div><div><br></div><div>Best regards,</div><div><br></div><div>Gary, K7EK</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE Smartphone</div><br><div id="htc_header">----- Reply message -----<br>From: "Bart Kus" <me@bartk.us><br>To: "Puget Sound Data Ring" <psdr@hamwan.org><br>Subject: [HamWAN PSDR] VOTE: 900MHz service experiment<br>Date: Fri, Mar 6, 2015 10:38</div></div><br><pre style="word-wrap: break-word; white-space: pre-wrap;">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
(<a href="http://www.balticnetworks.com/laird-antenna-omni-8dbi-900mhz-n-female-integrated.html">http://www.balticnetworks.com/laird-antenna-omni-8dbi-900mhz-n-female-integrated.html</a>)
2x 9HPn modem @ $108.00/ea = $216.00
(<a href="http://www.balticnetworks.com/mikrotik-metal-9hpn.html">http://www.balticnetworks.com/mikrotik-metal-9hpn.html</a>)
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
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