HSMM-MESH

Well this is a fine mesh you've got us into!

 

Umm . . . Nevermind.

 

Does anyone have a Good Home Brew antenna design for this System ?


Don

 

Hi Don,
What a few of us have been doing is finding unused/discarded "Wireless Cable TV" dishes and asking if the property owners would like them taken down, which most are happy to let us take them. They were used back in the '90's around Central texas, I dont know about elsewhere, and then the company went under, leaving all those big beautiful BBQ-style wire-mesh dishes around (not to mention various masts/push-up poles, etc).

With a slight modification to the feed, they work great for this, and will give you 15-25dBi of gain.

I have tried to make a 2.4ghz colinear with little luck. I guess the coax I used wasnt cut out for it.

You can look on the Internet for all the creative designs people have come up with for Wifi antennas (cantennas, loop yagi's, etc), and if there are calculations for frequency, we (by default) use 2412Mhz for center, with 25-30Mhz bandwidth.

73
K5KTF

 

Thanks for the info Jim.

I have played with the cantenna antennas with some luck. No way for me to really test the gain.

I like my original Cantenna , it is a Heathkit HN-31. It is a 1 KW Dummy Load in a 1 gallon paint can.

Have you heard of anyone using the Dishnet Dishes ? I have received on them at 2.4 but never tried to transmit.

There was a article on how to convert a Microwave oven into a 500 Watt 2.4Gig video transmitter years ago. It was very interesting. 2.450 gig don't work very well for radio reception at lunchtime...

 

A lot of people re-purpose the old dishes, I personally like the magnesium ones at fab-corp.

 

Reposted from HSMM-MESH.ORG

Folks here at the San Lorenzo Valley Amateur Radio Club are very excited with HSMM-MESH. I don't have an article about our achievements, but here is an update.

Our most significant success is adding 2m/6m-repeater control via an HSMM-MESH link. This new control link eliminates our club's monthly telephone bill. I don't think we're ready to publish details, but at the repeater site we use a WRT54GL with an RS-232 port. This link to the repeater is one of three links that comprise our current, disconnected network of five nodes.

We have many eager members, working equipment, and rolling terrain that is covered with 200-foot redwood trees. So CLOS is a challenge. Generally, the two nodes on opposite rims of the valley can see each other, but sights to and from potential locations lower down are blocked by vegetation. To understand our dilemma, here is a link to a (large) web page that shows parts of the valley that are visible from my house. Click the "Satellite" link in the upper-right corner to see what we're presented with. Although the visible area is large, what I can see is mostly trees, not houses.

http://www.slvarc.org/k3rry.html

Our long-term goal is to get a more complete network installed that has at least two available connections to the Internet. Since our 11-km rim-to-rim link is surprisingly robust (even though it goes through a tree) my hope is that that we will be able to connect the network using more rim nodes. With improved coverage, our network will serve as connections for other, temporarily deployed HSMM-MESH nodes.

We've experimented with both commercial and home-brew antennas. Here are some of the home-brew ones:

https://www.slvarc.org/all-articles/100-home-brew-night-2012

Kerry Veenstra, K3RRY

 

And where do you do your banking??