HamWAN…..

I’ve been watching and hoping one of the local wireless internet ‘things’ would take off. I think Seattle has at least three different groups trying to make a non-commercial wireless internet happen.  Two of the groups are ham radio based and I’ve been involved/closer to the two of them.  The first is based around the idea of mesh and has developed a lot of interest, but only a handful of nodes so far.  Most people are using hacked WRT54G boxes, but some have migrated to the more interesting M2 Bullet’s from airMAX.  I think the mesh stuff is interesting and I may yet get my Bullet up on the tower.

The other group is taking a different approach, they are much more structured and organized. At least in the since they have a core group really driving the solution and went so far to form a all-most non-profit corporation to support it. The basic idea behind this group is that Seattle is and Western Washington in general is uniquely situated with ring of high mountains surrounding it. Why not put cell sites on top of a bunch of these high mountains, inter-connect them and create a wireless internet. This group is using 5Ghz commercial gear, but is requiring a ham license to play.  They have been able to bring up three sites this summer and I spent a couple hours pulling some rope this afternoon as they did antenna installations on site two.

The picture on the left is one I took from the DEM CommMotorHome external camera, which was pointed at the tower installation work. I also captured one of Nigel-K7NVH as he was doing configuration of the radio’s. It was very enlightening watching the process they went through to align the big dishes.

So the plan is for me to installation my own uplink to the network on Monday.  I spent a while last night configuring the radio, the setup instructions are a work in progress, so lets hope I got it correct.  Tonight when I got home, Isaac and I assembled the dish.  I had originally planned to attach it to the tower, but I realized tonight that probably won’t work. The dish would need some kind of stand-off to go on the tower, so I’m going to try the 15 foot mast on the chimney. I don’t think the repeater antenna (W7RNK-B) will mind or interfere. I just hope the lost of 15 feet will enable it to still work. I know putting it up will be much easier if I don’t have to climb the tower.

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Whistler Weirdness

The family is in Whistler BC this weekend. We drove up Friday, leaving around 8am from Seattle. It took us most of the day to get up here. Granted we stopped in Mount Vernon for Starbucks and had lunch at Horseshoe Bay, but it seems crazy to me. Getting through the 30-40 miles of downtown Vancouver was crazy. Next time we will time it to not be late morning.

Another thing which is a little surreal, this ‘village’ is crazy impressive. It feels like Disneyland, but with real world shops. All the hotels must have to be designed the same way. You walk every where and there are no cars. You park in these huge underground parking lots. (For $25CDN a day)

The other thing which is really freaky, the number of different languages being spoken. I heard French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and what I think was Dutch walking to dinner. I know this is Canada, but its BC Canada. I don’t know if this is normal or something todo with all the crazy bike people here this weekend.

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