I am a new user in San Jose, CA. (CM97bg) looking to connect with both the AREDN community and the network.
I have a Ubiquiti NanoStation M5 NSM5 arriving in a few days but am not sure that there is anything to connect it to.
From the coverage maps it looks like Black Mountain is the only possible connection point beyone tunneling. I also have direct line of sight to both Mt Uhmunhum and Mt Hamilton. There are quite a few repeaters on Uhmunum and it probably has line of sight to Black Mountain (a guess) so this might be a logical growth point for the network in the South Bay if there is anyone interested.
Is there anyone able to guide me on what to do?
Thanks,
Scott, W1MVY
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New user in San Jose CM97bg looking to connect
Fri, 03/24/2023 - 13:44
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W1MVY
New user in San Jose CM97bg looking to connect
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I just started looking in to this as well. I'm in Santa Clara Cm97ah and was surprised to see such a weak mesh presence in the area. Maybe we can chat some time about getting soming going in our area.
Yes, let's chat. What is the best way to find you? I can be on the air, internet or mobile. Your choice.
Want to meet on the Good Samaritan (WVARA) 70 cm repeater (441.35 pl 88.5)? I can be on almost any time.
https://www.sfwem.net/ Looks like a good place to start sounds like both of us can hit black mountain pretty easy.
I connected with Jim, N9JIM, the guy that manages the Black Mountain AREDN site. Jim is a great contact and very knowledgable about what can and can't be done at this point. Jim came over to my house in Willow Glen with an AREDN dish and hung out for an afternoon playing with AREDN and filling me in on both the people and technology involved.
As it turns out, you really need to be line-of-sight with absolutely nothing blocking - that means no houses (the easy one) but also no trees. In San Jose, this makes the majority of the properties in the city unable to use Black Mountain, unless they are very tall, on a hill that can see Black Mountain unoccluded or have a large open space in front of them (like a field or huge parking lot) facing towards Black. Black is just too far north for reliable and easy San Jose 5.8 Ghz coverage.
There is some good news though. The West Valley club has shown some early interest in hosting an AREDN relay site on Good Samaritan - it will be awhile before we know much about this or it is implemented, but this may open up a slightly wider area of northern San Jose and Los Gatos. There is also talk of an AREDN backbone site on Mt Thayer and possibly another, Mt Allison in the East Bay. I suspect that Mt Thayer (near Uhmunum) would be our best bet - but San Jose needs a bunch of hams to both lobby for this and help fund/implement it. Uhmunum is no good because all the radio towers are on a peak behind the radar tower so would not cover San Jose well with microwave frequencies. Also the Penninsula AREDN guys have some energy about them - a welcome change from many local clubs.
Another possibility is simply to implement a bunch of RF islands in our city - linked to the rest of the network via Tunnels. This is the best near term approach - the equipment is cheap and this would allow some AREDN activity in the South Bay on all the maps - and make more support likely.
Let me know if you want to meet to chat.
Scott, W1MVY
I'm interested as well, only a few miles from Good Sam and my shack is under a tall redwood tree.
--john / KC6YYG
Just recently updated my nodes and put them back up in the air. Got a Rocket M5 feeding a 13 dbi omni antenna at CM97ck. Channel 179, 10 Mhz B/w. Feel free to point your dish my way and see if you can see me. Antenna's up about 20ft on a pushup mast.
37.4347863,-121.8811464