[argh, sorry about that - the keyboard shortcuts on Thunderbird and OE are subtly different and I obviously haven't mastered them yet!]
Apologies if this is old hat to you, but the community wireless installation we're doing at a local low-income housing project is teaching us at least as much about non geek wireless stuff as it is about RF and I thought others might be interested.
Here are a bunch more photos and a few more lessons learned:
http://socalfreenet.org/node/view/334
Mostly we're learning about mounting hardware, what to mount to and, of course, strange stuff about RF propagation. What a difference 3 feet can make! (About 15 dBi!).
The plain text follows, see the above url for pics and links.
<snip> Barrio Logan Install, Part 2, redux
Story submitted by mikemee on Friday, December 17, 2004 - 19:00
The link at the Mercado in Barrio Logan had marginal signal when we left last week, so I dropped by today to see what could be done to improve it. The biggest difference from the permanent install and the temporary one was that it have moved over a few feet and down about 3 feet. So I decided to try a longer pole. (Compare the image on right with the original).
First I moved up the backhaul antenna as far as the RF cable would allow - about 2 feet. That helped a little bit, maybe, but certainly wasn't dramatic. So I unmounted the radio and moved the antenna right to the top. The signal was about 15dBi better! So I remounted everything and left it there.
Only one strange thing left: the signal level is still quite variable - ranging from -69dBi to -80-dBi. Much better than it was, but that sort of variation is unusual. Perhaps its the trees that block the line of sight blowing in the wind? Pings are pretty steady, so the connection is solid enough (way better than before when it was dropping out completely for 10-20 secs at a time).
Update: Saturday 19th December
We went back today to tidy up some odds and ends, and because some members were available on the weekend who hadn't been able to join in duing the week and wanted to take a took. While we were there we decided to remove the wall mount and revert to a free standing mount. The extra mast height wasn't supportable by the wall long term (too much flex in the panel and nary a stud to be found).
While there, we climbed a couple more rooftops to survey the next likely location. Here's some shots from the day:
We were done before dark, so we took the opportunity to scout out our next proposed location. This is in another corner of the complex because we want to fill from the corners inwards. This ensures we get some coverage for the surrounding community and also gets the hardest nodes installed first while we're still energetic!
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