This past weekend a team lead by Isaac NB6F installed a new node at the San Francisco Fire Departments Division of Training & Neighborhood Emergency Response Team offices. This install was challenging as it required a 8 story stair climb without elevators, luckily Chris KD2AOY, Evan KC9IAE, Kiley KD8DRX & Greg W2GMD were on-hand. A few hours later we were live with our first Solar-only Omnidirectional 5 GHz Node in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District. This node serves the SFFD DOT, SFFD NERT, Mission, Downtown SF, SOMA, Berkeley, and the East Bay Hills.
SFWEM at the San Francisco Radio Club January 2020 Meeting
Kiley, KD8DRX and Greg, W2GMD were invited to speak on the San Francisco Wireless Emergency Mesh at the January 2020 San Francisco Radio Club meeting on Friday, January 17th. There were about 50 folks in attendance from both San Francisco, as well as the greater Bay Area, including our partners in the East Bay and Peninsula. We were flattered by the interest in this project, and were thrilled to present a project we’ve been passionate about.
As a bonus for those in attendance, a local Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) has been upgrading their existing 5 GHz N gear to 5 GHz AC gear, and contributed their legacy 5 GHz gear to SFWEM. We were able to clean, test and flash 15 NanoStation M5’s which were given out to those in attendance!
Special shout out to many of the existing SFWEM operators who were in attendance and who helped answer questions after the meeting. 2020 is going to be an epic year for SFWEM!
Attached to this post please find our presentation in PDF format, as well as some pictures from the event.
The rowdy crowd at the SFRC meeting.
Your kitchen table can double as a node staging area!
Kiley KD8DRX, aka Node Santa
KD8DRX Field Deployable All-In-One Node
KJ6PTX Walking Rover Node
Happy New Year! The Mesh is Growing!
Hey Everyone! Happy New Year!
We've made great progress on the mesh over the last few weeks. I always remembered from my days in IT that the Holidays are the best time to get any involved technical projects done, and that's reflected in the expansion of the mesh.
TL;DR
New Nodes & Sectors across the city
East Bay RF Link(s)
Mattermost Server
NVR (network video recorder) Server
Coverage Gaps & Bias
Visit www.sfwem.net/sites for the latest network and coverage maps
New Nodes & Sectors
We've added SF nodes in the following locations:
SF Richmond (Ryan/N9PYL)
Twin Peaks (Sky/AA6AX)
Duboce (Brett/AI5C)
Eureka Valley (Richard/KJ6PTX)
Sunset (Jerry/K6JB)
Including new wide-angle sector antennas at Twin Peaks and Duboce & Potrero.
Evan, Nathan, et al, have nodes in-had for testing and will hopefully be able to come online soon.
East Bay RF Link
From our new Twin Peaks sector, we were able to establish an RF link on 5 GHz (Ch 171) to the UC Berkeley Richmond Field Station across the bay. This connects us to a segment of the Berkeley Mesh. Mathison has also upgraded the 5 GHz node on the Hornet (Ch 171) and we're working to add a node SF to connect.
Mattermost
Isaac has added a Mattermost server, which is a Slack-like service: http://mattermost.local.mesh:8065/
NVR
There are several cameras installed across the mesh, so I've added a network video record to aggregate these feeds: https://sfwem-nvr.local.mesh:7443/
Ping me for credentials (you probably know them already).
Coverage Gaps
There are many areas of the city where we do not yet have coverage, even though there is interest in hosting a node, and we're in the process of building those sites out. However, there are two areas of the city were we have yet to garner interest: Marina/Cow Hollow and Bay View/Hunters Point. I'd like us to be cognizant of this as we expand our recruiting efforts and think of ways we can serve these Neighborhoods.
Shout-Outs
Special shout out to Isaac & Kiley for their hustle over the past few weeks, Sky for letting us use his cherry site up on Twin Peaks, Brett for his placement of a sector at his strategic location in Duboce, Richard for being alone in Duboce for so long, and Ryan for getting the Richmond connected.
Thanks to Mathison for getting the Hornet node back up, and for all of his guidance in getting our Mesh up and running. He definitely has more experience with this in the East Bay.
I appreciate everyone's efforts in building out this network, and look forward to what we can do in 2020!
New Hams, New Sites, New BOM, New Events
First, I'd like to welcome my long-time friend Pascal to the wonderful world of ham radio: KN6GFJ!
His first order of business was getting our latest RF & Tunnel nodes up and running, along with Jeff AJ6IY. They are now running a point-to-point 5 GHz connection in the Potrero Hill neighborhood, with an IP tunnel backhaul to ORION. I believe there is still some tuning to do on their RF link, but eventually we'd like to get a 5 GHz sector antenna Hub pointed west and south from that Location, giving us coverage of the Outer Mission and Hunters Point (tbd).
Additionally, we have an IP-tunneled connection up & running at the SF EOC at 1011 Turk St. If you're near the building you should be able to see the node on 2.4 GHz as well. We're working with the EOC to install some roof nodes (along with an HF antenna for ACS). This should give us a good east-of-downtown Hub.
We're updating the BOMs on the website to include specifications for an end-user node & high-site Hub.
Events
Next non-rainy weekend: Replace 90 degree sector antenna with 120 degree sector antenna at SF VA. Will also re-aim the antenna towards Inner Sunset/Richmond, Haight, Cole Valley. (stretch goals: re-aim camera, replace faulty 2 GHz node)
Friday, January 17th, 2020: SFWEM presentation at the January 2020 SF Radio Club meeting (3rd Friday at the SF VA). Kiley & I will be presenting on the SFWEM. Members & non members are welcome to attend. If anyone would like to provide any content or co-present, please let us know.
Saturday, February 29, 2020: At the SF ACS meeting last night we elected to do a trial of SFWEM at the ACS Quarterly Drill on Saturday, February 29th (leap day!). ACS would like to test the ability to stream real-time video from a remote-site over the mesh. Location and logistics TBD.
As always, we'll strive to have the latest information up at www.sfwem.net/start, and #sfwem on SF Radio Club Slack.
I appreciate everyone's support in getting this project off the ground!
New Website Launched
If you’re seeing this post, you’ve already found the new SFWEM website! We’ll be adding more content about the network in the coming weeks, but for now we’re looking for additional operators for nodes. If you have a high-site (roof or building top) that you can use to host a node, please get in contact with us! sfwem@undef.net