Monthly Update - January 2023
A very late but Happy New Year to everyone. This month we talk about the weather - I’m English, it’s what we do - and how we’ve all been fairing. Some well .. others .. less so.
Weather
A few folks around the Bay sent me news about how recent storms have been affecting their sites.
Starting in the Oakland Hills, the ORCA site's power went out when the underground cable between the club's radio container and the landlord's building failed, likely due to water intrusion in the cable. The site has batteries, but they lasted less than 2 days since solar recharge is impractical at the site. In the following week, KJ6WEG went up the hill several times to swap in charged batteries. This past weekend he, KJ6DZB, and many others from the ORCA club, made a heroic effort to dig a new 200 ft trench, lay conduit and replace the cabling, so once again, ORCA has power and is back online! Apparently the previous war-surplus direct-burial cable lasted about 50 years. Let's hope the new one does at least as well.
Meanwhile, to the north, the Hamilton Wireless Association site, at the old AT&T Long Line tower in the San Pedro hills, was temporarily cut off by falling trees. There are a fair number of houses in the area but fortunately no one was hurt. It took a little while, but the road to the site has now been reopened. Power was out for a while but is now restored.
Moving to the Peninsula, the South County Amateur Radio Emergency Services (SCARES) site on Kings Mountain suffered a number of power and internet failures. The longest outage was four days! Fortunately the site, at a fire station, has generator backup so the mesh nodes stayed connected. Talking to KK6DAC, they’re now investigating options for a backup internet (currently they use Comcast) as well as battery backup power.
Finally, power at San Bruno Mountain was out for a while. At Building 7, where we have our mesh nodes, KC6SVW provides battery backup for all tenants. This kept things up for a while, but as there is no generator, the site eventually went offline. Fortunately there was no damage and everything came back once power was restored. I popped in the other day and everything looks good.
The Year Ahead
As the year begins and the weather keeps us off roofs, hills and towers, I’m curious what people's mesh plans are for the next twelve months? The AREDN team is soliciting input for the 2023 roadmap and on a more local level I’d like to hear what people want out of BAM? Drop me an email or find me on the #sfwem Slack.
AREDN News
The AREDN team continues to publish test “nightly” builds most days as they refine and fix bugs before the next public release (no date for that yet). They recently added support for more devices, both old and new, validated more hardware, and rolled in the latest fixes from the OpenWRT point release 22.03.3. As always, beta testers are welcome, but don't try this firmware on any node you’ll regret not being able to get to.
73,
Tim - KN6PLV - tim@sfwem.net