CLUB NEWS

Yesterday evening I was back up at the club. We have a couple of pending problems there, which need sorting before much more time elapses.

One of them is our internet connection. The club does not have a telephone line and in spite of being right under a cellphone repeater, 3G and even GPRS mobile internet is intermittent at best. When contesting, we hang a USB internet connection out of the window and that's usually OK for cluster connection, but there are times when we would like or need a faster and more reliable connection.

Our techie team has decided that, in collaboration with club president Angel (EA5CVS) we should try and make a point to point wifi link from Angel's house to the club. Whilst the distance is not too great (around 1/2 km) there is a pine forest between the two points which makes things a bit trickier. Last friday we did the first tests and this friday we continued.

While Vic (EA5KV) and Elias (EB5KT) were at Angel's, this is what we were using at the club end:

Yes, that IS a router strung up on a rope halfway up a tower.....!

Once we got the other end working and "seeing" the router, we tried to use our secret weapon, the Bazooka:

Actually, its a long 5 GHz yagi inside a tube, homebrewed by Elias.

We set it up and ground level:

From L to R, Belar (EA5YI) Elías (EB5KT) and José (EA5GS)

No joy.

Since we couldn't climb the tower, and while we were trying to tackle the other problem, the boys went a-hunting for other wifi links in the area with an old Bi Quad we made for another experiment. Here's Belar on the roof of our club building:

No joy there either.

And in the meantime, the rest of us were searching for something that is making white noise in the ham shack and giving us S7 on 15m. After lots of RF sniffing, we are 99% sure its coming from the traffic camera TV repeater we have as a "guest" on our tower. Time to call the council......

It wasn't all lost time though, here's José giving WinTest the once over after installing it on one of the PCs:

Will we ever manage to get rid of the noise? Will we ever manage to get a proper wifi link? Stay tuned!