Hello,
We deployed stuff @ Baldi today. First, the good news:
1) We installed the cable between the buildings, and got all of them on
the gigabit LAN.
2) The 24-port switch for the middle building didn't arrive on time, so
we're using the full switch that was there already.
3) We aligned the Beacon.Baldi dish and managed to get another 10dB of
signal out of it now that it's focused solely on Beacon.
4) We got access points deployed into all the buildings.
5) We got the link to CampMurray working at last. The 3ft dish was
discovered to be damaged and had to be replaced with a 2ft from my
personal inventory. This will need an RF Armor shield, and an
additional expense report for the Baldi deploy budget to cover the cost
of the dish itself.
Now for not great news:
1) The Ethernet link between the northernmost building and the new
Rattlesnake.Baldi dish seems to be faulty. It was raining hard when we
were installing this, so maybe there's water in the connector. It's also
deployed pretty close to lots of VHF/UHF antennas, so maybe the RFI is
killing the Ethernet. We need to go back on a dry day, hopefully with a
cable analyzer, and examine the situation. If it's VHF/UHF RFI, then
we'll need to run fiber to the modem. I have disabled the power to the
dish for now, on the theory that water is causing PoE arcing at the
modem contacts and we don't want that electrolysis process to continue.
Power draw to the modem is not unusual, about 3.2W, although it has been
observed to be quite variable at times, from 3W to 4W.
2) The AP in the northernmost building appears to have really bad
performance. I had a hard time pinging it over WiFi from within the
shack. Had to resort to using wired Ethernet to get any packets moving
and work done. I've no idea the cause of this. Perhaps a spectrum scan
is required.
3) The VHF DMR up there appears to have been static-IP configured and
didn't migrate properly. We'll need some follow-up remote work to
re-program the repeater for DHCP.
I think that's everything noteworthy.
--Bart
