[HamWAN PSDR] Baldi deployment report

[Doug Kingston]

Thanks for the update and all the hard work.  Despite your no-so-good news,
there was lots of good progress as well.

-Doug-

On Sat, Jun 6, 2020 at 11:59 PM Bart Kus <me at bartk.us> wrote:

> 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
>
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