New Node in Birkenhead/Northcote

Hi All,

After what has seemed like a big uphill battle I'm here, mounted, installed, powered up, and ready for some wireless goodness.

My house has a fair view, but I've managed to convince the neighbours to let me use their roof for an even better view firstly, and secondly so I could get a link to travln. They we keen on them not having anything to do with it, so I've had to power it from here -which meant it was time for a crash course in PoE (Power over ethernet)

This meant undertaking rather an ambitious power over ethernet project too because of the distances involved. - especially for someone who hasn't done so much as crimp a cat5 cable before!
Further, I'm running 2 APs up there!

On the test bench using the entire 100m cat5 cable there was too much voltage drop with my 19V power supply for both APs to run simultanoues using 2 pairs of the cat5. Interestingly using 5 wires was enough for it to work though.

Fortunately the Linksys WRT54GS APs have switching voltage regulators, which means I could feed them a wide range of voltages without having to buy regulators.

Once all installed I had about a 70m of cable to the furtherest AP, and by injecting the power in my roof as close as possible to the corner of our house, the power only has to travel about 50m (at a guess).

I use both pairs, one pair for positive, and one for negative to the first AP, then along a seperate cat5 between the two APs, using both pair in that cable to minimise voltage drop.

AP1 is connected to a Waveguide facing the city, and it has a huge view of the shore near the bridge.

AP2 is connected to a 19db grid which is pointing at travln, with the intention of bridging/routing between these two connections to provide access from as far away as the cdb onto travln, and hence up as far as albany depending on who is connected to him at the time.

The AP's are housed in wooden boxes that my helpful dad made for me. For those doubting how watertight or secure something wooden could be, read on for the pictures, these things are hurricane proof! I could stand on them!
It's weatherproof ply for starter, but we painted them very thickly with roof paint for several coats just be sure, and all edges are siliconed for extra water tightness.

I'm useless at making webpages I'm afraid, so hopefully below you'll see pictures of my install, and what my waveguide can see (hopefully YOU!)

The Cable going between my house and 'the shops' next door.



A helpful friend just looking for an excuse to drill something!


Mounting my homebuilt AP-box


AP-box and Waveguide


Linksys WRT54GS #1 ready to be installed in AP-box


Closeup of Wiring/Cabling for the First Linksys


And Rear


Here's a better shot of how the AP-box works,
The AP sits on a board, and that whole board slots into the AP-box housing from the bottom, which is recessed a good distance inwards to stop any water possibly getting in. And the top of the boxes has a overhanging slope to shed any surface water.


The following is my attempt at a panoramic show showing what the waveguide can see.





As you can see, it has a HUUUGE view, so I'm hoping that this will be a very useful connection for the rest of the nzwireless community, lord know I've spent enough money and time on the project - so I hope its useful and I look forward to networking with everybody

At this stage I'm still in the setup stage. Both APs have been flashed with linux firmware, I have the sveasoft firmware on one, and the openWRT on the waveguide's AP.

The second connection is meant to be a peer connection to travln, but since he's down I'm happy to connect with anyone else that can get a good signal off my 19db grid - I was really surprised how much it can see!

So this node isn't what you would call reliable yet, but this is just a note to let ya'll know I'm here with a 54Mbit connection, see if you can see me from your house, and if so - lets start networking!

And I'll add at this point that I left kismet running on both APs overnight on saturday, and I found 72 networks between the two of them!

SEVENTY TWO!!

I've already made a successful connection with the borg node in grafton, whose waveguide isn't even facing me! So I know there must be at least someone out there that can connect to me. Just looking at nodedb, I'm guessing that these people should have a good shot:

DataBiz
Py7h0n?
postfach
BSD
and others in the city
And someone called WLAN has a great connection to my GRID to the north.

My SSID is griffous@nzwireless.org, and it's channel 6 for the waveguide.
If any of you can see my grid (facing north) it's griffous2@nzwireless.org, and channel 11.

I'm still not altogether sure which IP range I should be using - looking at the list to your left it seems there is several ranges - can someone please fill me in on what to use?


Thanks:
Special thanks go out to Richms, who inspired the project, and helped me setup all this up, he also loaned me gear, and leant a hand with the final installation.

And a big thank-you to stevewright for his never ending patience and very helpful suggestions with the power over either side of this - I had NO IDEA!

Andrew and BORG for the antennas
Michael for selling me the powersupply running the APs.

and Dave (the dodgey looking dude with the drill) for helping with the install on the roof.

Thanks All,
Drop me an email:
griffous@griffous.net
Gr|ffous

well done... I'm especially impressed with the AP box

2 questions..

How come you didn't mount the WG at the highest point on the wall?

Whats the capacitor for?

going to hazard a guess and say that it's for smoothing the power and helping the regulation a little

Thanks for the kind words Whetu,

And yes you're quite right about the Cap.

The theory behind it, is that although my APs only draw about .65A once their both up and running, it's the initial surge of power to get them up and running that overloads the power cable to them.

So to combat that, and also just to help with general stability and smoothness, on steve's suggestion I bought the biggest cap that dick smith sells, which is the blue 5500uF you see above.

I didn't actually try the connection without it in the end, but it can't be doing any harm I'm sure
I know on the test bench using the full 100m of cable (and no cap), either AP would come up fine, but if tried to have both running the voltage would drop to about 3V, and the current would shoot up to 1.6A - and neither worked.

As for the waveguide, because it's not my roof I was trying to respect the asthectic value of the building. I'm sure the owners wouldn't really want this big thing sticking up even higher then it already is - and really... look at the view - how much of a difference do you think it's gonna make
I'm just happy they let me use the roof at all, I didn't want to go pushing my luck.

So I mounted it about halfway down, where I felt it wasn't sticking out too much.

Gr|ffous

Yeah, lotta work went into those boxes... think I will have to commission Jonothans dad to build me a new letterbox

I think it will be linkable over to james, anyone heard from him recently? We can see 2 nolfolk island pines from the roof.

Im going to re-visit the link to seton from here this weekend so hopefully it ends up being a winner.

Looks good guys, well done

That looks really good.

I busted my AP and when I went to fix it I stuffed up my connector on the cable that goes up to the roof. I'll try and get something back up real soon.

Cheers for the kind words guys.

Noodles, I've tried emailing you and PMing you, but I can't seem to get through, which IP range would you like me to use?

And Travln, hopefully rich and I can get you up and working again this weekend. It will be good to start making some use of this gear.

I've been quite surprised that no one has contacted me wanting to connect up, I'm sure heaps of people can see me

Gr|ffous

build it and they will come.. patience young grasshopper

Hi, since noodles has seemingly missed this post, i'll answer the question for you.

This is from his e-mail to me.

If anyone wants I am happy to take over subnet control.

Thanks,
Cameron

__________________
NODE ID: 194
NODE NAME: Efenthar

Kung-Foo Webdesign
<a href='http://www.kung-foo.co.nz' target='_blank'>http://www.kung-foo.co.nz</a>

Thanks Skink,

Good on ya - I guess we'll see what the other mods think. In my case I'm setting up the wireless network with the express intention of connecting networks together, and hopefully quite a few of them, so it will be important to get it all right.

For now I'm using 10.0.20.0/24 as it just logically fitted in with the rest of the my network, but as more folk connect I may have to come up with something more official.

For me it's probably not that big of a deal to swap it around later if I need to.
This weekend if we manage to get travln up and going again I'll have to sort some routing out, and then clients from the shore and over the bridge can connect to him and whoever else is hanging off his AP.

Gr|ffous

I have a new AP DWL2000AP+ and a jumper cable to hook it up. I'll try and see if I can do it tomorrow. I got up on the roof just now and had a quick scan. Here is what I can see at the moment. http://210.48.99.14/nzwireless/august7-2004.JPG

I still have 4x WAP54G bridges and a waveguide plus some others. Anyone know where I can get some cheap TNC<>N Type connectors? I can't get a hold of shadow.

I've got 6 RP-TNC for LMR195 crimp connectors if that is any help.
$10.00 each.

Dellae,
I'd be interested in one of those connectors for my Linksys WRT54G
so I can get my Borg waveguide going again.

I may be able to see griffous once things are connected again.

The only issue this that my pigtail is LMR200 not 195 so I have to
sand down the centre conductor to fit the middle pin.
Do you have the crimp tool as well??

PM me, if you want, to talk further.

__________________
Steve M
Bigted
Cute, Furry and Cuddly

Done.

I can help with making pigtails if required.

Howdy,

When putting up my mast at ECR, I was able to see trvln, I'm wondering if you can point a parabolic up towards albany / east coast road and see if you get a sniff of my network. If you can, this will link you in to browns bay, albany and parts of greenhithe.

Talking of ip ranges, I havn't really stuck to whats on the page here, i've kinda taken liberty and used 10.23.* (for clients) and 10.22.* ( for backbone) so this may cause a conflict. I'm currently using the following:

10.23.19.0/24 (lower albany)
10.23.18.0/24 (lower albany ethernet)
10.23.17.0/24 (ecr)
10.23.15.0/24 (upper albany)
10.23.14.0/24 (upper fernbank greenhithe)
10.23.13.0/24 (lower fernbank greenhithe)

Hopefully we can get more people linked together.

If anyone here living in torbay or northcote would like to host one of my AP box's so I can extend the range of my network, I have a kit sitting in my garage all ready to go.

Update on my setup,

We're up and running with both APs working and connected to other hosts.
The routing is very much just quickly patched in for tonight, but I've had Matt from nzpages pinging trvln's AP. Wahoo

Speed tests are still underway, so far I've had a max of about 200kb/sec from trvln to me.
I seem to have a fairly stable ping to nzpages, and a better SnR, but only getting about 50k/sec with him downloading off my web server.

So not the fastest network, but hopefully we can improve it a bit still.

Auckland Wifi is really starting to look impressive now:
http://www.nodedb.com/newzealand/ni/auckla....php?nodeid=193

More to come later

And as always, the more folk who connect up the better!
Anyone who can find my ssid, drop me an email and we'll see if we can connect up.

griffous@griffous.net

Can't see ur SSID but if anyone can see me, and even if they can't Im wanting to be an active part of this network, not just another of those money wasting ventures, I built this node so that it would be useful.

got plenty of LOS from the roof. also got a 128k pipe which can be used if you need an uplink, no charge on the internet access, but it is not permanently up until its needed, I will still get first pick of the bandwidth tho, if im transferring something big i'll cut the bandwidth for outside users to 64k, thats still half tho.

__________________
NODE ID: 194
NODE NAME: Efenthar

Kung-Foo Webdesign
<a href='http://www.kung-foo.co.nz' target='_blank'>http://www.kung-foo.co.nz</a>

I can see you

http://210.48.99.14/nzwireless/august7-2004.JPG

sweet,

what sort of antenna were u using?
Perhaps we could get a better shoot or I could put another parabolic on ecr.

Was 19db dish.

I have now put in a firewall. The IP range used on the AP is 10.23.24.0/24. DHCP should be working. There should be 3 IP's on the network permanently.

10.23.24.254 router/firewall.
10.23.24.253 AP
10.23.23.1 a Windows 2000 box running IIS.

Hi All,

Unfortunately matt of nzpages is moving! so my wifi link to him will be going down today.

Is anyone else able to swing an antenna up my way? With matt using a nasty dlink bridge, and a 12db PANEL antenna we were able to get around about 320kb/sec last night so there is _plenty_ of signal out there to be used.

The more the merrier

Join on in the fun!
Andrew was able to get a link from bucklands beach for crying out loud - ok not a good one, but basically anywhere that can see the bridge should be able to see me.

And trvln is almost ready to go so they'll be a good few hosts behind my AP for you to chat with.

Gr|ffous
griffous@griffous.net

Well done griffous. Finally a reason to kickstart things around here again.

Give me a few days and I'll try out a connection.

Can only just pickup trvln atm. Will work on it more.

Hmm, well if you can pick him up, then you must behind the waveguide. My link to him is a 19db grid, so I don't imagine you'll see that very well unless you are behind him from my perspective.

But join on up, trvln will be routing packets between all manner of links by the sounds.

Go the weekend!