[CQ] 900 MHz Amateur mesh networking

[Bruce Perens]

I joined this list a long time ago in response to Jason's talk on 
Amateur mesh networking. My feeling at the time was that the distance 
capabilities of wifi had been oversold. However, the idea of Amateur 
mesh networking remains a good one.

After my East Bay ARRL talk last month, Bill Smith AB6MT of the Marin 
Amateur Radio Club contacted me regarding their experiments with 900 MHz 
wifi-like links. These are supposed to do significant distance over 
"near line-of-sight" conditions. I don't know if they do or not, but 
I've helped the Marin club configure their systems for testing. They're 
in ad-hoc mode so that the club can play with antennas and ping one 
system from the other. We'll see what they achieve.

The systems currently under test use a Ubiquiti Routerstation with XAGYL 
FLR9G30  900 MHz 1000mW miniPCI cards. Routerstations have 3 mini-PCI 
sockets and 3 ethernet ports.

I have ordered a RouterStation Pro, two Ubiquiti SR9 cards, a Wifi N 
card, and a 900 MHz "spectrum analyzer" dongle for my use.  This system 
can route from the 900 MHz cards to wifi, so it's easy to connect to a 
laptop. Routerstations have 3 mini-PCI sockets, a "WAN" port, and three 
ethernet ports on an internal switch.

The only shot I have out of my QTH on the edge of Wildcat Canyon (Tilden 
Park) is toward parts of Richmond, Petaluma, and Sonoma Mountain. But I 
should be able to do some mobile tests.

The 900 MHz cards are work-alikes to wifi cards - the wifi software 
thinks the channels have 2.4 GHz frequencies and the driver in OpenWRT 
works out of the box.

XAGYL is also promising to make 450 and 700 MHz cards.

     Thanks

     Bruce



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