[MLB-WIRELESS] Trafalgar wireless project

[Stygen]

On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 12:35, sandbar wrote:
> Ey people,
> Trafalgar is a small town along the Princes Highway about 113km east of 
> Melbourne, population 2200. Telstra has said it is willing to enable the 
> town's exchange for DSL if 200 people sign up for it. Bad.
> Trafalgar's council offices has a mast-mounted 24dBi Hills antenna 
> sitting about 30m off the ground. It was used to connect the council 
> with its offices in Warragul, about 13km away, but is now disused. It 
> has a c.20m run of inch-thick heliax that terminates to an n-type 
> connector inside the building. Good.
> Baw Baw Shire Council is willing to allow public access to the antenna, 
> and house the hardware to run an access point for both local access and 
> a back-haul link to Warragul. Very good.
> My initial thoughts are that one Linux box would be able to handle both 
> local access via an 8dBi omni mounted on the 24dBi antenna's mast above 
> the roof line to serve the Traf community, and the back-haul link to 
> Warragul where a similar set-up is possible. This means we'd need an 
> 8dBi omni, and a mast-mounted AP using PoE.
> Council's estimate at this stage is that about 25 people in Traf will 
> use the service, although not all at once.
> Any coments or suggestions? I mentioned to council's representative that 
> Melbourne Wireless members would never knock back a free snag, beer, and 
> wireless pwn, and would more than likely help with an install if a day 
> was arranged. Council has even said it will cough up the c.$3k for a 
> crane to come in to haul a fearless member of the wireless community up 
> to the top of the mast to tweak the gear. Don't get opprtunities like 
> that every week, ey?
> - Barry


Sounds like an excellent opportunity to be a geek for a cause.

Things to be aware of;

A) While the wireless stuff will most likely not interfere with anything
else on the mast, you need to be mindful of what spews out from the AP
and/or linux box that goes up there.  One of the WaFreeNet AP's had to
be removed from a commercial mast as it was interfering with other
equipment there.  It couldn't go back up until a box was constructed to
shield it from the other equipment (which was quite an undertaking). 
Might be an idea to do this before it goes up there.. just in case.

B) 25 people using one Access Point is going to result in hidden node
issues.  Might be a good idea to look into QoS solutions such as frottle
to keep the clients connected and happy.  You could also set a few other
AP's around Trafalgar and split the connections up into sections (this
creates more issues, so the trade-off is up to whoever sets it up. 
Certainly worth just trying the single AP first).  You could also set up
a couple of access points with two 180 degree antennas to split the load
geographically (N-S or E-W)

C) 25 people using one Access Point will result in only having about
200kB/s to split between all the users after considering overheads and
the by-product reduction in total bandwidth of QoS solutions.  While
users may not all use it at the same time (resulting in 8kB/s each
up+down) they should be made aware of the minimum expected service.


Well worth looking into if you think people will be interested.


-Stygen


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