[HamWAN PSDR] HamWAN Fall Update

[Nigel Vander Houwen]

Hello HamWAN,

I’ve got a generalized fall update for everyone, and a large number of thanks to hand out for a huge amount of efforts folks have put in recently.

We’ve got a new cell site at Beacon that has been physically deployed by a huge number of volunteers putting in quite a bit of time. Beacon isn’t quite online yet and available for connections, pending the team having time to configure the gear (but that’s fortunately not weather sensitive). I’d very much like to put out a huge thanks to the team who worked on deploying Beacon as listed here: Richards, Leon, Osborn, Chan, Kus, Sheppard, Maloy, Kingston, Hayward, Neals. If there are any I’ve missed, please forgive me, and know that your efforts have been hugely appreciated.

We recently visited Baldi to get the site prepared for winter. We were able to get a new large battery bank installed on the UPS at the site to improve HamWAN’s runtime in the case of a power outage. A new PDU was installed so we have better visibility into power usage, and control of our devices on site. And to swap the broken Baldi camera, so here going into winter we have newly repaired visibility into the conditions up at the site. I’d like to thank Tom, Bart, and Bruce for their efforts up at Baldi getting us ready for winter.

I was able to join Bart for a bit of one of a number of recent trips up to Haystack he has made in recent weeks getting the site prepared for winter. Additional solar panels have been added, as well as an experiment with a wind turbine, in the hopes of ensuring enough power availability over winter, so we can avoid the outages we saw this last winter. He has put in tremendous effort to rework the whole site’s power system to provide significantly better visibility into the power sources and sinks, as well as vastly improved control. A new PDU was also installed at Haystack which helps us better manage our PoE devices. I’d like to thank Bart for the massive amount of time he’s put into this effort, as well as his contributions in terms of acquiring the panels, turbine, and all the other supporting gear that’s gone into this retrofit. Hopefully we’ll be in far better shape on the power budget this winter.

I’ve recently been primarily focused on building the new PDUs we’ve been deploying to the sites, and the board met earlier this evening to approve the expense for the PDUs going into these site improvements. They end up giving us quite a bit more visibility and control into our PoE powered devices. These PDUs take a number of man hours to put together, and I’d like to thank Bart for CNC machining the faceplates for me earlier this year, so I’ve been able to focus on the soldering and assembly of the end product.

Work to get the state connected at Camp Murray is moving slow, but it is in progress.

I’d also like to highlight some of our sister networks.

Interior British Columbia ( http://www.hamwan.ca/ ) has a few sites online at this point. Really impressive progress.

HamWAN Tampa Bay ( http://flscg.org/ ) suffered some minor damage knocking one of their cells offline during the hurricane, but that has since been repaired. Glad everyone is safe, and things are back online.

Again, please forgive me if I missed any big progress/news from our sisters.

Thanks again to everyone, whether you just follow the project, or have had a chance to come out and help with a deploy. Together we make HamWAN work.

Nigel