Monthly Update - August / September 2022

In this month’s update I wanted to talk a little about communications in BAM, how Abraham Lincoln once said “we all need another wiki”, and I also had a few requests for more information about the Bay Area Backbone project.

Communications

One of my goals has been to improve communications about what BAM is up to. Part of this is me writing this newsletter every month (and I encourage people to send me things to include or questions to find answers to), but so far a lot of my time has been fishing information out of the heads of individuals and writing it down. This is an ongoing process for sure, but the current status of everything going on (that I know about) can be found here:

http://kn6plv-wiki.local.mesh/

I’m a big believer in transparency and openness, and this wiki will be my continual effort to provide that to the community. Ultimately anyone on our mesh should be able to come to the wiki to find some piece of information they need, the right person to contact, help on a project, or just to get a handle on what’s happening. And while today this is mostly me contributing (although I noticed KJ6DZB updating the camera page), I hope others will register and help out too.

The Bay Area Backbone

At the moment, setting up a new node outside of San Francisco / Berkeley / Oakland can be a bit hit or miss with few good connection options, and often tenuous attachment to the rest of the mesh. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem for the ham turned AREDN enthusiast - being the first node in your area with no one to talk to isn’t too exciting, so why bother? Wouldn’t it be better if there were some good places that, standing on the roof of your house, radio in one hand, zip ties in the other, you could point your antenna at?

What it is

The Bay Area Backbone is a long term project to encircle the Bay with a group of high-altitude, highly available, interconnected AREDN nodes. Based on the experiences of the people building out the Southern Californian Mesh, there are advantages to having a mesh with some hierarchy and structure. “High sites” provide a solid, permanent set of well connected nodes, easy for any ham to connect to, and guaranteed to be active and available every hour of every day of every year come rain, smoke or … fingers crossed … earthquake.

Constructing the backbone is an unfortunately long, slow process. It requires multiple radios, some AREDN some not, installed at sites which probably host other radio equipment. So there’s negotiating with the landlord, evaluations to avoid interfering with other tenants, and establishing whether the site provides good line-of-sight both to other backbone sites, as well as targeted coverage to support current and future AREDN fans. And once plans are finalized, there’s site access to be considered. At many favorable locations and secure sites, it’s not acceptable for random people to show up unannounced and start climbing towers. Coordinating all these moving parts takes time and executing can be difficult.

The adage “Make friends with your local repeater owner” is appropriate here. Repeaters have been in place for decades in some cases, and many of these sites are ideal for AREDN too. In fact the first major backbone sites are located in the Oakland Hills with the Oakland Radio Communication Association, on Mount Diablo with the Mount Diablo Amateur Radio Club, and in Alvarado Park with the Contra Costa Communications Club.

Technology

AREDN software and hardware is a fantastic way to get up and running on the BAM network, but it may not always be the perfect choice for the backbone. Experience has demonstrated the usefulness of off-the-shelf radios unsupported by AREDN. In addition, BAM partners with other groups and organizations to construct the backbone, piggybacking our technology over theirs. Ultimately though, the backbone delivers service to our community using AREDN; it remains simple, cheap, and effective.

Metropolitan coverage

The initial work on the backbone has concentrated on connectings the counties of the Bay to each other. From there we can bring stronger connections into the cities; working with the owners of tall buildings, the fire departments, hospitals, coast guard, and other public and private organizations to create accessible AREDN sites.

The end goal

An effort like this will take a few years to complete; but the end goal would be to have many connected high sites and cities around the Bay as well as north into San Rafael and Antioch, south down to Santa Cruz, and east out to Livermore. It’s a lot of work, with most of it still to do.

How can you help?

The backbone effort is still in its early days with only a few established sites in the North Bay active at this time. And while there are potential locations in various stages of development in the South Bay, we badly lack site locations to the east (San Leandro, Hayward, Fremont, Concord, San Ramon, Livermore) and west (San Mateo, Woodside, San Carlos) sides of the Bay. And we’ve not even begun to worry about heading north. Do you own a tower in these areas? Are you on good terms with the manager of a very tall building? Let us know! I will personally drive down with a car full of equipment and help you set everything up. And we’ll all be forever grateful.

Where are we today?

You can find the current status of the BAM high sites on the wiki here:

http://kn6plv-wiki.local.mesh/index.php/High_sites

and the backbone here:

http://kn6plv-wiki.local.mesh/index.php/Bay_Area_Backbone (or https://sfbackbone.xojs.org/)

I will continue to provide as much documentation and information about sites, services, and future plans as possible.

Pacificon

Pacificon 2022 is almost here. It runs Friday through Sunday, October 14 to 16. This year there will be an entire track devoted to AREDN with speakers representing the Southern California Mesh network, our own network in the Bay Area, as well as AREDN software developers. It’s only $25 to attend and it's a lot of fun. All the details can be found here https://www.pacificon.org

AREDN News

AREDN is gearing up for a new release, near the end of August or the beginning of September. This will be the third release this year(!) The last release was in June, but it contained huge code changes and, inevitably, a few problematic bugs slipped the testers.

As well as bug fixes this release will contain many improvements, including fixes for PowerBeam performance, improved DHCP handling, published service validation, enhanced WAN WiFi, expanded LQM support, and lots of other goodies.

73,

Tim - KN6PLV - tim@sfwem.net