Meshfest After Action report

Post date: Jun 23, 2014 2:48:22 PM

Good times at the 1st Meshfest at the groovy UnallocatedSpace in Severn, MD! The Meshfest was a drop-in GOTA for amateurs that wanted some help with their nodes.

About 20 Meshers showed up including homeboy Rich WA3YTK from PG ARES. With great help from Robert KB3ZZD and the great host Charlie KB3ZVN we were elmer everyone who needed help! Heck I was able to get John's (KA3WSR) Ubiquiti M2 up on the mesh. The photo is of the mesh status from the NanoBridge M2's perspective.

To do list:

• we need a Meshfest in PG county, Unallocated is a bit far for me ~1hr (40mins in low traffic)
• we need to test the mesh over a wider area. Charlie noted from the OLSR routing table that all the nodes were only one hop away--its hard to test the mesh with the nodes in such close proximity
• the Ubiquiti units are really cool. John's M2 is capable of 27dBm into the ~20dBi(?) parabolic ~50W effective at the antenna according to my calculations! Holy crap! The stock WRT54s can only do about 19dBm (79mW) into the coaxial dipole rubber ducks (0dBi?)
• One of KB3ZZD's nodes was acting as a Internet GW using a wired connection to one of Unallocated Space's ports. this allowed all the meshers easy access to the hsmm-mesh.org site to for information and guidance.
• WB2IFS-101-mobile ran from the starter battery in my CRV for all 4 hours! Excellent performance for an emcomm deployment.