Monthly Update - September / October 2022
In this month’s update we look at how Bay-Net is adding to the mesh in the South Bay, how the Marin Amateur Radio Club are extending it to the north, and we solicit some wiki feedback.
Bay-Net on Black Mountain
Bay-Net WW6BAY is an open amateur radio club in the Bay Area, known for, amongst other things, the excellent BayCon (https://www.bay-net.org/baycon.html) every year. More recently they’ve been helping to expand AREDN in the South Bay.
Bay-Net is one of the tenants at Black Mountain Site 4, a pair of radio towers with an excellent view of Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Mountain View. This area had previously been poorly served by the existing mesh (suffering from the chicken-and-egg problem: no nodes to talk to, so no point in putting up a node) but members of the club wanted to fix this. So last month a ground crew with climber AI6MS spent a day on Black Mountain putting a 5 GHz, 120 degree sector antenna up on the high tower, and finally giving Silicon Valley an excellent AREDN site for everyone to aim at.
So if you are in the South Bay, did not have great connectivity before, and can see Black Mountain, check out the new node on channel 175.
North Bay Area Mesh
Back at the end of 2020, SFWEM received a grant to expand its emergency data network into more of the Bay Area. Before this, efforts had mostly been focused on San Francisco and the East Bay. Even with the grant, SFWEM was mostly looking south. Someone needed to look north; and that someone is NBAM, the North Bay Area Mesh (https://www.northbaymesh.org).
NBAM’s goal is to take the established Bay Area network, and expand it throughout Marin as well as into Sonoma county. To quote from their website:
“Through our efforts, Sonoma and Marin will be better connected to the established mesh which serves San Francisco, San Mateo, and Alameda Counties. NBAM is an active partner with the Bay Area Mesh (BAM), formerly known as San Francisco Wireless Emergency Mesh (SFWEM). A project of the San Francisco Amateur Radio Club, BAM has successfully placed more than 200 mesh nodes in the central Bay Area. [...] The long-term objective is to provide a region-wide communications network, operated by ham radio volunteers, that will provide robust backup communication in case of emergency.”
I could not have said it better myself … so I didn’t :-) For anyone in this part of the world who wants to help out, or needs help setting up a new AREDN node, there’s a handy contact form at the bottom of their website. Hope to see more nodes soon!
Pacificon
Pacificon 2022 is right around the corner! It runs Friday through Sunday, October 14 to 16, with talks on AREDN and SFWEM related things on Saturday morning as well as a Q&A later that afternoon. SFWEM will be there helping people get on the mesh. And I’m told we will have stickers! All the details can be found at https://www.pacificon.org.
Wiki Feedback
Feedback on the wiki was positive; thank you for that. One request I had from a few people was to make the wiki available on the Internet and not just the mesh. I’d like to find out what more people think so I created a one question poll:
https://forms.gle/NLdupB4LFLP9Ymyu7
Please take a moment to vote.
AREDN News
AREDN released 3.22.8.0 at the end of August; the third release of the year. If you’ve not upgraded yet I encourage you to do it now. There are some great performance improvements and a few security fixes you really should have.
73,
Tim - KN6PLV - tim@sfwem.net