[HamWAN PSDR] Baldi deployment report

[Bart Kus]

Hello,

We deployed stuff @ Baldi today.  First, the good news:

1) We installed the cable between the buildings, and got all of them on 
the gigabit LAN.
2) The 24-port switch for the middle building didn't arrive on time, so 
we're using the full switch that was there already.
3) We aligned the Beacon.Baldi dish and managed to get another 10dB of 
signal out of it now that it's focused solely on Beacon.
4) We got access points deployed into all the buildings.
5) We got the link to CampMurray working at last.  The 3ft dish was 
discovered to be damaged and had to be replaced with a 2ft from my 
personal inventory.  This will need an RF Armor shield, and an 
additional expense report for the Baldi deploy budget to cover the cost 
of the dish itself.

Now for not great news:

1) The Ethernet link between the northernmost building and the new 
Rattlesnake.Baldi dish seems to be faulty.  It was raining hard when we 
were installing this, so maybe there's water in the connector. It's also 
deployed pretty close to lots of VHF/UHF antennas, so maybe the RFI is 
killing the Ethernet.  We need to go back on a dry day, hopefully with a 
cable analyzer, and examine the situation.  If it's VHF/UHF RFI, then 
we'll need to run fiber to the modem.  I have disabled the power to the 
dish for now, on the theory that water is causing PoE arcing at the 
modem contacts and we don't want that electrolysis process to continue.  
Power draw to the modem is not unusual, about 3.2W, although it has been 
observed to be quite variable at times, from 3W to 4W.

2) The AP in the northernmost building appears to have really bad 
performance.  I had a hard time pinging it over WiFi from within the 
shack.  Had to resort to using wired Ethernet to get any packets moving 
and work done.  I've no idea the cause of this.  Perhaps a spectrum scan 
is required.

3) The VHF DMR up there appears to have been static-IP configured and 
didn't migrate properly.  We'll need some follow-up remote work to 
re-program the repeater for DHCP.

I think that's everything noteworthy.

--Bart