eric’s extremeboredom

Saturday’s field day was a success! The alki group got together around 11:30 and quickly had a link to the folks at magnolia.

The primary form of communication between sites was FRS, which was absolutely horrible. Apparently everyone else could here us fine, but we could barely hear anything, and had to constantly ask the other end to repeat what they said, causing much frustration for everyone involved. For the next field day we are definitely going to consider CB or MURS as an alternative.

I also ran an IRC server on my laptop which worked quite well when my laptop wasn’t randomly disassociating from the network for no apparent reason. When there wasn’t a huge cargo ship in our line of sight, the link to magnolia was good enough to make VoIP calls across the water using a WiFi SIP phone that Casey brought. It was pretty cool to see people from all three sites chatting over a completely “off the grid” network.

A bit later in the day, Ken pointed another antenna around towards downtown and got a ridiculously good connection to some “free Internet while you wait” access point. He advertised it over the mesh so folks at all three sites were able to get online without any additional configuration.

Gasworks fell through due to lack of planning but everyone there eventually relocated to a hill above the Elliott Bay Marina, and managed to join the mesh by linking up to us at alki.

Everyone involved had a great time, and many people expressed interest in doing this more often. Once winter is over, expect to hear about Spring Field Day 2007!

Photos:

• http://pics.caseyhalverson.com/album/10175/all
• http://www.networkoverload.net/photos/swn06fd/
• http://flickr.com/photos/tags/2006fieldday/

Categorized as Other, Events, Technology, SeattleWireless, Technology