From eric at christensenplace.us  Fri Mar 20 10:27:12 2015
From: eric at christensenplace.us (Eric Christensen)
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2015 10:27:12 -0400
Subject: [CALV-MESH] Welcome
Message-ID: <16dba1621afbfdc51a25a141e641189a@www.christensenplace.us>

Okay, I see that most everyone that I thought would have subscribed to 
this list have subscribed to this list.  Thank you for doing so.  In one 
of my organizations that I contribute with we believing in failing fast 
so we can get beyond it and move on to a success.  Unfortunately my 
failure with the previous listserv and the wiki were not fast to be 
fixed.  They have, however, been remedied as of yesterday.

The wiki, where many people added good information was attacked by 
spammers which drove the size of the database from a few kB to over 7 
GB.  It wasn't pretty.  It's also not as easy to get rid of all the spam 
as I would have liked.  Yesterday, I created a new wiki and hand copied 
the pages from the old wiki over.  The good thing is that we now have a 
shiny new wiki running on LTS (long term support) software with all the 
good information contained within.  The bad thing is we lost all the 
author and revision history in the move.  There's not a lot of 
information in there and if it looks technical it was likely Karl's 
doing.  Going forward I hope to do a better job at keeping the wiki 
clean and up to date.

A word about security.  Only admins to the wiki will be able to create 
an account on the wiki.  The problem we had before was that anyone could 
create an account with just a minor test to make sure it wasn't a bot.  
This clearly didn't work out very well.  I'm going to create everyone an 
account that is currently subscribed to this list and you will receive 
the login credentials via email.  Also, the listserv is setup with a 
public archive and anyone can subscribe.  New subscribers will be 
moderated until their first few posts have shown that they are 
trustworthy.  Since I recognize everyone that has currently subscribed 
I've removed the moderation for everyone as of now.

A word about licensing and copyright.  This probably isn't a big deal 
for most people but since this is something I deal with every day I felt 
it necessary to add a policy.  The words and works that are added to the 
wiki are owned by the author.  That means that if you contribute to the 
wiki you own the copyright for that work.  You also, however, agree to 
license the work to CARA and others under a Creative Commons BY-SA 
license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).  This 
protects the copyright owner as well as promotes other people to use and 
build on the works.  This seems to be in line with what amateur radio is 
about.  If you don't agree with these terms please let me know and we'll 
talk about it.

Other than that lets go have fun.  I'm currently working on putting 
together some 900MHz information that I'll publish on the wiki later 
today.

73,
Eric W4OTN/3

From eric at christensenplace.us  Fri Mar 27 23:17:34 2015
From: eric at christensenplace.us (Eric Christensen)
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2015 23:17:34 -0400
Subject: [CALV-MESH] A quick scan of 5GHz from Chesapeake Beach
Message-ID: <3755859.WnLG9PEU7i@eric.home.christensenplace.us>

I hooked up my NanoStation loco M5 tonight and did a scan of the entire 5cm 
(5.650GHz to 5.925GHz) band.  There seems to be some use of the band between 
5716MHz and 5821MHz with a majority centered on channel 149 (5745MHz) and 
channel 153 (5765MHz) using 20MHz channels.  I suspect one of them is my LAN 
in my house.  Other than those two signals the only other "noise" I saw was 
generally up to 5821 but I couldn't really determine what it was.

I was going to setup my 2.4GHz station but I can't seem to find any of the 
gear.  I'm hoping in the light of day I'll be able to find it.  My plan is to 
use my 8dBi omni antenna with a Bullet M2 and then do some non-scientific, more 
real-world test with another Bullet M2 and a panel antenna.  If anyone would 
like to try to connect up just let me know and I'll keep my home station up.

As soon as I get the shack straightened out a bit more I'll be putting some 
services up on the mesh station including IRC and maybe a XMPP server for IM.  
Both should be pretty efficient.

73,
Eric W4OTN/3