Wireless surveying

Over the past week we have been doing some wireless surveying with mixed results.

Last Friday (24/9/10) Ben Hadler and I took the spare NanoStation up to Goodlie Hill where we managed to connect to the Village Hall node.  As this site has no mains power, we used a 12v to 240v inverter in the car to power the device.  Signal strength was good, S: -66dB, N: -91dB, and speeds were approaching 3Mbps.  Note that our nominal purchased backhaul bandwidth is 2Mbps.

We then took the NanoStation up to a high point at Maisonngill where we plan to install a second off-grid wireless node to serve that and neighbouring farms.  We had no joy in establishing a connection back to the Village Hall and assumed that there was insufficient line of sight between the two locations.  We concluded that any node up at Maisongill would have to connect to a different node from the Village Hall - possibly Goodlie Hill.

On Thursday (30/9/10) I took the NanoStation up to Great Kettle Barn where Mick Clayton kindly fixed it to the end of his Velux window pole and stuck it out of a first floor window.  After a bit of trial and error we got a good connection back to the Village Hall (S: -75dB, N: -93dB) and speeds approaching 4Mbps.  The connection should be even better once a proper node is installed on the chimney.

Google Earth view of the area we plan to cover showing existing wireless nodes plus a new location at Maisongill

Yesterday (1/10/10) I returned to Maisongill, this time with a 2.4GHz wireless access point to see if I could make a connection to any of the nodes in the existing network.  The Velux window pole came in very handy again.  A wireless survey picked up five different mesh-boxes at Goodlie Hill, the church, Great Kettle Barn, Asby Hall Mews and, surprisingly, the Village Hall.  Encouraged by the latter result, I tried again to connect the 5GHz NanoStation.  Only briefly did the wireless survey show the node at the Village Hall but then it was gone and no connection was made.  A bit of a mystery and one for Guy and Simon to solve.......!

Guy has supplied five more NanoStations for the purposes of further surveying.