Operation Powdermesh

Operation Powdermesh is an outdoor radio experiment and social outing on Powderface Trail.

Get out.  Bring radios.  See what happens.

There is interest in using the mesh node technology as a possible data network in some of the Amateur Radio event support deployments.   To be truly effective at the event organizational level - there are many components beyond the radios themselves that need to be in place.   Rather than the whole system - this outing is about the simplex performance of these nodes.  Knowing what they are capable of in a real environment is foundational to performing any kind of planning based on them.

The basic idea is:  put radios in the field and see what actually happens.    This specific area is selected because it is a known 'interesting' RF area, it is a regular location where support for a performance car rally happens, and it's a nice place to be on a Saturday in August.    We have the area well characterised for how it works with Amateur Radio - and can use that to coordinate ourselves while we are out there.

What you need is: 

• Snacks, 

• your own gear for being out in this area, and 

• radio equipment:  0 or more transceivers for 915MHz mesh, or 2m/70cm ham you'd like to try using. 

• GPS receiver / navigation - we have locations of interest to navigate to, and signal reports are more useful with a known origination location

We will figure out any pairing or movement plans on site, including deciding whether we manage a road check-in and check-out while mobile (small group) or if we designate a static station to manage this. (larger group)

Specific things to try:

• In Pairs - travel to an identified point of interest (POI).   One station stays static at the POI,  the other travels up the road.   Log  location/RSSI/SNR as available - see how far down the road 

  • We are looking for simplex coverage - how far these reach directly point to point.   We actually don't use the 'meshing' behaviour for this observation.  The next step from knowing simplex reach is to assess how many repeaters it would take at road level to reach between the POI.

  • A good elevated spot in this area will cover a wide area, and if available in a deployment we will use this - but event support proceeds in some severely cold and otherwise unfriendly weather when some of these infrastructure nodes may not be easily reachable.   A deployment has a high degree of control over locations that are immediately accessible during the deployment.

• We'd like to try two different modulations.

  • 1:  Match the YYCMESH parameters.   These settings are already well characterized from work around Calgary - making any of our observations comparable to those.

  • 2:  Reduce bandwidth to 125kHz,  Keep Spreading Factor 11,  Keep Coding Rate 4/8.     That's one variable difference. 

• Try VE6PR at the POI,  log results.

  • This repeater hasn't been used in this area for event support before, and we were curious about how well it reaches.  VE6RYC reaches Powderface by reflections and some diffraction.  VE6AUY has a line down most of the valley.  VE6PR is between the two and we don't know what we might see from it.