[HamWAN PSDR] Beacon Tower-Capital Park Backbone Link

Wed Mar 28 10:03:01 PDT 2018

Tom and all,

Access to both of the Seattle Housing Authority buildings (Beacon and Capitol Park) can now be much more easily facilitated. A limited group of Seattle ACS technicians have the ability to access at any time (Randy, Doug, Casey, Mark, myself), and have varying levels of knowledge and experience with HamWAN. So immediate fixes can be facilitated if/as needed. To bring someone else in requires about a week’s advance notice so we can request a training mission number from Washington EMD and process the others as temporary emergency workers (doing this is a requirement under our MOU’s with SHA).

ACS stands as a committed partner with HamWAN. It is our desire to do what we can to support the existing structure, as well as promote and facilitate growth.

Carl, N7KUW

Deputy Director, Seattle ACS

From: PSDR [mailto:psdr-bounces at hamwan.org] On Behalf Of Tom Hayward
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2018 8:46 AM
To: Puget Sound Data Ring
Subject: Re: [HamWAN PSDR] Beacon Tower-Capital Park Backbone Link

Randy,

Capitol Park also links to Queen Anne, which links to Haystack, so it's not single-homed. That said, there's a lot that could be improved at Capitol Park. It has traditionally been hard to get access to, so it doesn't get much love.

We've never done any 24 GHz, and $1458 is a lot to spend on one link. We've also never done any non-Mikrotik gear. A consistent OS makes writing configuration automation a lot easier. Change is hard.

I agree with Bryan's point that I don't want to support a company lobbying to take 10 GHz away from hams. I took a quick look and other 24 GHz gear appears to be about twice as expensive. Hmm.

There's a lot of broken stuff right now, so my priorities for the next few months will be helping with repairs rather than improvements. And East Tiger is now single-homed, so it would be nice to find something for it to connect to in the SW direction.

Sorry for the lack of depth. Busy week.

Tom

On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 1:41 AM, Randy Neals <randy at neals.ca> wrote:

Hi,

I was digging through the HamWAN Map and Monitoring site to better understand the connectivity and redundancy of the backbone supporting the two key Seattle HamWAN sites, Beacon Tower and Capital Park.

To recap what I observed...
Documentation suggests backbone connectivity at Capital Park is:
a. PtP link to Baldi
b. PtP link to Paine

The Capital Park to Baldi PtP actually appears to be a Point-to-Multipoint Link with 2 clients registered on the Baldi radio. I suspect that is Capital Park and Beacon Tower sharing access to a single dish/radio at Baldi.

The Capital Park to Paine PtP seems to be decommissioned.

Question: Am I correct in believing that Capital Park is single-threaded with just one backbone connection to Baldi operational?

Suggestion:

I think it might be prudent to have a direct PtP link between Capital Park and Beacon Tower.
The sites are 4km apart with good visual line of sight. These two sites are very important to Seattle users.

Proposal:
24 GHz is both an Amateur Radio band, and an ISM unlicensed band.
This band works very well on short point to point paths. Further, 24.05 to 24.25 is an ISM band and can carry commercial traffic or amateur traffic.

24 GHz could be utilized on the Beacon Tower to Seattle EOC link.
This link is very short (1.1 Miles/1.7 Km) and is a really good use case for 24 GHz.

Equipment for 24Ghz is not particularly expensive.
Mimosa announced a new B24 model on March 6 that has a $729 per end cost for integrated dish/radio. https://mimosa.co/products/specs/b24

Using 24 GHz to the EOC would allow the repurposing of the 5GHz link intended as Beacon-EOC to be a new backbone path Beacon Tower to Capital Park. I believe there is ample room at Capital Park to add a 2' dish pointing at Beacon. This path is about 4km and would not be suitable for 24 Ghz. 

The outcome of this proposal would be:
1. Seattle EOC-Beacon being linked at very high speed over 24 GHz. (circa 1 Gb/s)
2. Beacon Tower-Capital Park also having a high speed 5GHz backbone (circa 100 Mb/s)

These key sites in Seattle would be less reliant on Gold, Baldi, and Haystack for connectivity within the City of Seattle/across town.

There is an obvious cost implication for this change, but it's not particularly large and could make the network more robust. I'd be willing to contribute to this and others may also also do the same.

Thanks for reading this and considering it.

Randy
W3RWN

_______________________________________________
PSDR mailing list
PSDR at hamwan.org
http://mail.hamwan.net/mailman/listinfo/psdr

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.hamwan.net/pipermail/psdr/attachments/20180328/316813d3/attachment-0001.html>