Post TU Comms and Networking

[River Song]

It's been a while so will bring an update.

The PABX works a dream whether we have internet or not. The smartphones connect via wifi. The biggest problem is getting access to it for more than 20 yards or so.

Been doing a lot of research and looked at putting a wifi access point up a pole.
Invested £70 in it and found that it was worse than my BT Home Hub. It didn't have a wide direction - quite narrow and I would probably need 3 of them to give me 360deg cover,. So thats £70 I wont recover.

River Song is not beaten. I'm still working on meshs as a way of networking.

LS - If you are an active Ham, I might be able to point a few things to you
if you are interested in some more techy stuff.

Allons-y

[CharlesHarris]

I don't know if they are legal in UK, but in the US you can buy a low- power cellular repeater with WiFi hot spot, similar to those used for small business use. Mine is mounted high on the roof top and allows multiple connects within about 200 metres. Cost was about $250, plus running the cable, which I did myself.

[NorthernRaider]

Cheers Charles I am going to check that out cos I need something similar to boost the appalling cell tower signal indoors

[Lightspeed]

Disappointing range RS

Good that you are not beaten.

Keep up the good work


LS

[CharlesHarris]

I picked up a used building system inexpensively when a tenant moved out, but this is the original supplier:

http://www.wilsonelectronics.com/store/i...arge-areas

[River Song]

Charles - Nice piece of kit but would not work in the UK. Our Cellular frequencies are totally different. Also I'm not convinced you can play around with the gain.

In addition this kit, and the discussion, is around boosting cellphone coverage. I'll look into that. My OP and subsequent posting is around Wide Area (1-2 mile) WiFi coverage.

Laters ...

[CharlesHarris]

I have an 11-element, 13dB yagi antenna on a 2-wavelength boom, end-mounted on rotating mast, turned with a TV rotator, so that I can adjust for the best signal. The locations of all cell towers are listed witb GPS locations on the FCCs licensing database, so that if is easy to locate a tower having a clear rf path from my location.

[CharlesHarris]

Even allowing for line losses, which are considerable for cable runs over about 50 metres at UHF frequencies, a 13dB antenna provides about a ten-fold increase in effective radiated rf output, compared to an isotropic source. The Wilson repeater has about 5w output into the feedline, and is connected to the antenna with Times Microwave LMR400 cable, which is the same used by the cellular companies for short runs from their NEMA cabinets housing rooftop equipment on high rise office bulidings. This is lower loss typical cable used for ham radio, but easier to deal with than the large air dielectric cables, such as Andrews Heliax which is used for long tower runs of 100 metres or more.

[River Song]

More progress.

I was always convinced that Meshed Wifi is going to be the way to go.
Although I managed to get kind of Meshed software up and running on a laptop,
I couldn't get any meshed software up and running on my target unit, a £38 computer (yummee)
Now I don't mind going through lengthy installation processes but I stop short
of having to hack apart Linux code. (A girl's got better things to do .... innit!)

As I said in a previous post, I have managed to get a full blow PBX up and running on this £38 computer
with a handful of extensions on smart phones. Good enough but unless I can Mesh them through the village I am limited to basic wifi distance.

This evening I found a source of ready built meshing computers complete with pbx software etc
that have a distance between nodes of around 2km line of sight. (Thats the difficult thing .... line of sight).
I've ordered a couple of these to play around with and at around the same price as my original target units they seem good value.

I'm now looking for a high point in the village. My local vicar, I've found has a stash of food, gennys, medical supplies and even -- wait for it .... a pair of UV5R's .....

He may let me use the tower of the church for experiments --- in the name of community cohesion. If it wasn't for the dog-collar, I'd kiss him.

More news as it happens


Allons-y

[River Song]

A Day of Total Frustration.

I wrapped up 3 out of my 4 micro-computers up and put them on the side.
Left one running the PBX - all well and good.

The new meshing computers arrived but sadly they didn't have the pbx loaded on board,
and although I could hack and install, I was more than happy to get these two units meshing together over wifi.

Connected one of the MESH's - call it MESH-A onto the router and thereafter to the Internet.
Ran up MESH-B only with WIFI - they meshed together over wifi. (Look mum - no cables)

Connected PBX onto the router.

I can connect my iPhone to either MESH-A or MESH-B and thereafter to the PBX or The Internet.

Lovely Jubbly - A technical term.

Now consider that the router is not there, i.e. I want to strap a MESH and PBX together.
It don't work and all of a sudden NOTHING worked.

I isolated this down and saw a number of software errors on the PBX at boot time, i.e. couldn't get DHCP running which means it can't get an IP address.

F....

Reinstall PBX

Same thing.

F....

Then I noticed that a number of lights were out ... and then the ethernet switch was out ..

O bugger --- I only bought it last week.

Took it in the kitchen --- plugged it in --- same there.

Hmm

Then I noticed a little switch on the power cable. It had slipped off.

AHA

Lesson for today ??

"It helps ya silly cow if its switched on"

Onwards .....

---

Oh - BTW - Charles - your technical posts are referring to GSM or what we know as Cellphone or Mobile Phone frequencies

This thread is about WiFi or 802.11 which an altogether different leopard darling.