[HamWAN PSDR] HamWAN client testing

[B.J. Guillot]

Thanks to those of you who responded to my questions the other day about
client equipment.

I was chatting separately with Kyle Burgess (KD7IYT), and he offered to
bring his mobile KISMET vehicle with 42+ feet mast and HamWAN setup (Mikrotik
RB Metal 5SHPn modem) to my home to see which sectors I'd be able to hit.
He and Matt (didn't catch Matt's call sign) showed up for a couple of hours
of testing.

Home location
48.026167N, 122.121500W
Marysville WA
(If you Google Map it with satellite view, it's the house with the solar
panels.)

Unfortunately, we could not establish a connection to the Snohomish County
DEM (Paine) sector (about ~15 km away).  There are apparently too many tall
trees in the way or other obstacles.  He tried various mountain top
sectors, but I can't see the Cascades from my area, so none of those worked
either.

For grins, he tried the Seattle sectors  (~40 km? away), and we got a weak
connection.  We weren't sure exactly which sector we were hitting (he said
there are two it could have been), but we got the Internet and were able to
do some tests.  Upload/Download speeds were only a bit higher than 0.3
Mbps. (In comparison, Kyle lives about 3 miles from me in Marysville, and
can easily hit the Paine sector and get 16 Mbps.)  We didn't try Victoria
because his modem wasn't set for their frequencies.

I'll need to decide whether it's worth it to try to setup a permanent
antenna for such a slow speed, but he said 0.3 Mbps would be plenty for
VoIP phone calls which could be worth it in emergency situations.  It might
be fun to just use the connection to experiment with all kinds of things.

Thanks to Kyle and Matt for going the extra mile to see what I can hit from
my house.  We actually had many neighbors come out to see his truck and ask
questions while he was there.

73s,
B.J. Guillot
KI7ZDF
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