Outdoor Enclosures

[kc9uhi]

I just ordered one of these - http://www.ebay.com/itm/360781359144 on ebay. It's a 9x9 plastic box for cable tv demarcation point, but may work well for housing a wrt54g router outside.

Another option at twice the price is an aluminum enclosure from Tycon http://tycononline.com/accessories/encl ... 0x8x3.html. Found these via a ham group that uses them in Henderson Kentucky - http://kc4bqk.blogspot.com/

[kb9mwr]

Overall, I do believe you are better off using cheap Ubiquiti bullets, meant for outdoor.

http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/documen ... -beta-test

These guys have been doing mesh on the bullets for a while (I been following the Seattle digital guys for years), have a document in the files section on it. http://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/NW-MESH/

Ubiquiti uses the Atheros chipset. The problem with broadcom chips (linksys) is you are fighting with all the part 15 users on the normal channels. All the height and power in the world won't get around a guy on an Iphone below your antenna (capture effect). For the first week on the St. Norbert to Scrays hill link we ran normal channels. What a headache with the dorms so close by. So I set 2390-2400 a 10 MHz wide channel and never looked back.

Two low power bullets into 16 dbi screen parabolic reported:
http://kb9mwr.dyndns.org/~kb9mwr/snc-scripts/snrlog.txt

[KC9OIS]

I have to agree, the Bullets are probably the way to go for many reasons. They are made for outdoor use, they offer more flexibility when it comes to frequencies and options and as you said, you can shift the frequencies and bandwidth to offset and reduce interference. Not to mention they are newer technology (they have POE).

The Linksys are nice because they are cheap. The BBHN firmware manages the network configuration and IP addresses automatically, but they require outdoor enclosures, adapters and some hardware modes depending on what your requirements are. Weatherproofing any enclosures (including the mentioned above) is challenging. It's a tight fit even with the circuit board removed from the Linksys case. Most of the holes don't line up and the unused holes will have to be plugged along with the cable entries and still allow for accessibility and changes. And then there's the adapters from the RP-TNC to N connectors used on most parabolics, panels and omni antennas. None of these are a big deal since we hams thrive on the home-brew concept and adapt to change, it just requires a little more thinking outside the box! .

Overall though, the cost difference between a Linksys based node and a Ubiquiti Bullet may be negligible and the added features and flexibility of the Bullets appear to make them a better choice. With BBHN for the Ubiquiti products in beta test now and a release scheduled out early next year, the combination should prove to be a good fit for BBHN-Mesh.

The BBHN firmware makes meshing pretty much plug and play. Especially when it comes to managing the mesh network. I not sure that plug & play is a good thing, although it does make it easier to setup a mesh node/network, "Hams" still should have a good understanding of the basic concepts of the equipment and technology they're playing with.

I've been following the Seattle digital guys for about six months now. They have a different approach than the Austin group. Both have their pros & cons. I've downloaded all the documentation files and firmware for the Bullet for the NW-Mesh folks to flash my bullet. Coordinating IP addresses and and getting it to talk to the Linksys BBHN mesh will be interesting ,as it's all manual. Should be an interesting learning experience to fill the time until the BBHN firmware is released for the Bullets.