Twinnell House Node Revamped
This afternoon Matt and Lloyd braved the wind and rain working on the roof of Twinnell House, the main network node. The following improvements were made:
- Replaced ‘floppy’ aluminium pole with more rigid steel pole, reducing signal loss due to wind agitation;
- Removed redundant lightning arrestor on signal cable attached to omni-directional antenna;
- Replaced and re-weatherproofed exterior connections;
- Re-pointed directional antenna from Easton Community Centre to St. Werburghs Community Centre;
- Replaced questionable Linksys WRT-54g AP on omni-directional antenna;
- Swapped ‘dumb’ Netgear WGE-101 on directional uplink antenna for second ‘intelligent’ Linksys WRT-54g.
Initial indications are good; signal strength from the lab (connected to the omni just as any other client would) has doubled.
Something about Lloyd Cohen
I manage the technical running and rollout of the BristolWireless network. I've started a network consultancy company with a couple of other BW members, we live at http://www.nixcom.co.uk/
do you reckon if we put a client in the ECC the link would be as good as the lab? BTW what hardware doe we have at ST Werbughs?
Really not sure about the ecc and connection, as for hardware at st.werbs its just a wrt54g in client mode and a bit of routing 🙂
Only doubled huh! Mine has gone up from averaging 30% to a whopping 75%.
I don’t really know how those relate to actually connection quality in a db sense. I’ll try out some bandwidth tests soon.
I was looking for a fuller explanation for our readers! 🙂 (even better a digram)
Are we linked into the Inty Box at St Werburghs? Actually i’ve got so many qusetions about just this small bit of the network, I’m not sure this is the place to ask them. :X
The Linksys WRT-54G is on the wall in the community centre. It’s attached to a 15dB directional antenna pointing at Twinnel House. The Linksys is running as a client on the network, and is connected directly to a Dell Optiplex PC running Pebble Linux. This is acting as an OSPF gateway and performing NAT translation. This is connected via a very long cable to the ADSL router. The Inty box is also connected to the ADSL router, but uses a different IP address, and hence is entirely protected from our network (and vice versa).