Sunday, October 14, 2012

NW-Mesh

For those of you who haven't discovered the NW-MESH Yahoo group, you ought to.

This group of hams into HSMM mesh networking in the pacific northwest region of the USA has made HSMM-Mesh on Ubiquiti devices happen.

It's not a pre-rolled firmware build yet.  But rather a step by step how-to on how to roll your own:

Configuring OpenWRT Devices for Operation on the NW-MESH Network via the GUI:
http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/NW-MESH_GUI_Config-2012101401.pdf

 You start by flashing OpenWRT, and then add in the OLSR module.

OpenWRT is very powerful.

This is ideal for those seeking a customized mesh network.  Idea for those seeking to use Amprnet IP addresses (44/8, 44net) rather than the 10/8 network that is pre-configured in the BBHN builds.  This eliminates the need to setup GRE tunneling as 44net is already connected. 

In this screen I am showing the add software tab, where you can add OLSRD
This screen show the available wireless channel bandwidth options.  Sadly 10 and 5 MHz/ half and quarter rates are not available without some editing of config files. 

This shows how to set a custom channel, you enter it as -1, etc.

(Note: The software says it's on a lower channel, but when you go to confirm this with a spectrum view, there is nothing there. Turns out the underlying kernel module, ath9k has to be modified, this fellow ham has documented how: http://yo3iiu.ro/blog/?p=1301)


Available transmit power options.



This shows how to select the country code of 00 for world.


This is the status page showing -1 as 2402 MHz.