Re: Marina base station coverage?

Jeff's rules for community wireless networks:
1. Never do anything for free. You can always give a discount or a
temporary free deal, but you can never go from free to paid.
2. Everything requires support, tinkering, negotiation, and more
money.
3. There's always someone just outside your coverage area.
4. Support calls always arrive at inconvenient times.
5. The surest sign of success is abuse and pollution.
6. Free help never seems to arrive.
7. Backers are aptly named.
8. Learn to play policeman, executioner, judge, and Solomon. All are
necessary skills for community networks.

These are $5k/yr (and up) slips. I won't be the least bit sympathetic to
the whiners at the fringes if they're not willing to pony up some cash. But
even without their help it's not like it's going to break any banks getting
this gear.

Likewise, if its a free service then interruptions are to be expected.
Sometimes done deliberately to 'adjust' usage patterns. Nothing like
silently dropping service to a given MAC when things get out of hand. I've
had plenty of experience administering large networks and dealing with
(l)users. I'll have my marine-grade LART handy.

Playing Solomon hits the nail on the head. I generally find it's better to
let them think things are being run poorly (or even incompetently), rather
than taking a confrontational "informed" approach. Just let things
mysteriously become "unreliable" for them until they wander off finding
other things to occupy themselves. No sense arguing with them or
confronting them about spending all their bandwidth downloading porn or
whatever. Just let the net flake out, perhaps timed appropriately right
before the end of those video clips...

BoFH rules apply!

The biggest challenge I'm expecting is avoiding freeloader abuse by folks
anchoring just outside the sea wall of the marina. Hopefully some down tilt
on the antennae and adjusting of the radio output power will help stave that
off. But we're also planning on not broadcasting the SSID and changing it
on a semi-random basis. This is certainly 'not secure' but it's a bit of
security-through-obscurity. There will be a notice posted in the club
house with the current SSID. And since it's free, they'll get what they pay
for, support-wise.

There will be no support. If they get it working, great, otherwise, pound
sand.

I'm really only expecting about 8 or so vessels will even bother making use
of it. I suppose I could've just signed up for comcast and stuffed a router
in the pedestal near my slip. But that'd require paying those rat bastards
money and I hate comcast. This way it ends up shared with other slipholders
and I get to learn some new stuff.

Hints: Concentrate on the antennas and the topography and never mind
the amplifiers, exotic access points, and high power. Be very
concerned about interference problems, especially from other wireless
networks. Take the time to do a site survey.

Yes, already done one, informally with netstumbler. Existing coverage is
exceptionally poor (thus my embarking on this journey). There's a WEP
secured network and a weak open one. Otherwise it's relatively barren,
signal-wise. This also gleaned from doing a site survey lookup from the
WRT54G running dd-wrt with a pair of 9db omni antennae. Even with better
antennae the number of SSID didn't increase.

Install and use some form of bandwidth management (QoS) to avoid one
user hogging the whole system.

Yep, already expecting to do this. Mainly to make sure the one wired
desktop has guaranteed bandwidth on demand. This whole thing is freeloading
the uplink from the marina office. The one guy in the office doesn't use it
for all that much so it's largely idle. But on the few occasions he's
likely to be doing anything I'm going to try configuring it such that his
box gets priority over everything else.

My only real question at this point concerns what antennae to use. Your
suggestion of sector type is probably the most appropriate. Getting that
square panel, while it might help the inital 'proof of concept' would
largely be a waste of money, but not all that much. I could always recycle
it for on-boat use as a directional.

Hmm, I'm wondering if a 120 degree sectional would suffice? Like this one:
http://www.hyperlinktech.com/web/hg2414sp-120.php
or the 180:
http://www.hyperlinktech.com/web/hg2415p_180.php

The 120 might be better in that it'd avoid serving anything on-shore. That
and it's quite a bit less expensive than the 180.

-Bill Kearney

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