The Enid Amateur Radio Club

What in the world are those crazy Radio Active people up to now? Last Month we met at the regularly scheduled Radio Active (RA) night time and place: Third Thursday, 7pm, Red Cross. Tim Mcanally gave an excellent presentation and demo on High Speed Multi Media Mesh Networking (HS-MM Mesh).

We’ve been looking into the possibility of getting some nodes going in Enid. So far we’ve located and upgraded three routers. Until we got them together we were scratching our heads wondering what the goal of the exercise might be.

So what! Right? You are right if you are talking Point to Point. But with Mesh architecture, you can bounce this stuff all over the place. The system works like a mesh rather than a bus network. What that does is keeps us from having to string the nodes from one to the other to get connectivity to the other nodes. It also means that if one goes down it doesn’t necessarily mean everyone else is dead in the water.

So, say you have one at your house that is pointed at one of the grain elevators and you have yours sharing the Internet. Tim has a node and is in on the East side of town setting up for a bicycle race. He can’t hit your house from there. But, he can point at the one on the elevator and still get the internet (or whatever application you are running) via the elevator. Or, if you have a third node in Garber and a fifth at Woodring, you can get into the network as long as you can hit any of those nodes… Like Tim’s. It's like a spider web. If you can hit any one node you can get to any of them.

The routers take care of all the, "who's on first and what's his names on third" stuff that normally has to be manually configured. That makes the system very flexible since the nodes only have to be joined to the MESH Via SSID to be properly configured.

It's not really built around internet access. So far that's what we've successfully accomplished. It does that beautify.

The trick is to figure out how to get the shortest amount of feed line between the router and the antenna while getting the antenna to a point where you have line of site with one another (Spelled ANY OTHER) node. That's where the power through the Cat 5 of 6 cable comes in. That way you can put the router (Radio) up on the pole with the antenna and feed it through unused wires inside the Ethernet cable. Ethernet only uses two of the four pairs; Orange and Green. The others; Blue and Brown are dark (unused). So, instead of having the radio and power supply in the shack and running the signal up the tower, you have the radio on the tower and run the power up to it.

We use Linksys Router s (WRT54G*). A quick check on EBay reveals them going for as little as 9 bucks each. A guy in the office even gave me one. All but a couple of the different models work. Some have a little less internal memory and the software doesn't fit. Once the software is modified and the router becomes a Mesh Node. A high gain antenna (2.5 GHz) should enable us to shoot this stuff several miles. We’ve found that there are tons of high gain antennas available commercially and in junk piles. I bought two from the club at the Enid Hamfest for a buck each.

We’d love to get local hams involved. Don’t worry about the technical network Mumbo Jumbo. Tim’s the expert on that. Plus, the MESH software pretty much takes care of that. The more nodes we can get going the better chance we have of covering territory where we might be able to better serve the Red Cross or other agencies.

Ham Radio, what a diverse hobby!"