The Lake Alyson links are up and running and the coverage is amazing! We just picked up the signal 8 miles away near Frontier Airpark with an RSSI well above -70!

As soon as the customer equipment comes in we can start getting everyone hooked up :)

Regards,

Aaron

We just finished building out the Tower Relay for Lake Alyson, and it's a beauty! We have a great link from the tower to our backhaul relay site on the other side of the river and have tested the link into Lake Alyson with temporary gear on a tripod. The results were very exciting - A high speed, stable link with low latency. We expect even better performance from the permanent mount, which we will be installing tomorrow.

We have finally managed to find a way to engineer a backhaul into Lake Alyson! We found a location with line of sight to our tower as well as to Lake Alyson and have come to an agreement with the owner of the property where we are going to locate the backhaul relay. We are going out this afternoon to test the equipment and plan the access point distribution throughout the community. We expect to have service available throughout Lake

Hello,

Some of you may have noticed that our telephone has been having issues the past week. It seems something had been botched up during our service upgrade to the phone system and we were stuck without phone service for a couple of days. We have resolved the problem and everything is working properly again.

Regards,

Aaron

My name is Ben and I am the youngest member of the Tbird team. I thought I would start my blog by cleaning up some misconceptions about networking, speeds, and the good old “Intro-net.” 

Lets start with the basics. The first thing about networking that everyone needs to know is the difference between MB’s and

We were out doing installs at Aspen today and everything was moving along just fine when suddenly...nothing happened.

We were as mystified as you are.

Our gear just stopped passing traffic. Unfortunately we were doing an install at the time so we spent a good hour troubleshooting the install untill we were finally able to track it back to the relay. Right about that time the hail turned to snow. We started replacing wires, switches, power supplies, anything we could think of we replaced and still no luck.As it turned out the radio that brings the main link into Aspen got too cold and the internal heater was not keeping up. I adjust the thermostat settings and we now have the system back online :) We go back to the location tomorrow to move the radio into a heated area, away from exposure to the elements. It set us behind schedule on a couple installs and delayed our Lake Bosworth test, but we will be caught up by early next week. I'm just glad we were able to f ...

Looks like it's time for another Thunderbird Update :)

Tomorrow (Friday) afternoon we are doing a survey at Lake Bosworth for a possible repeater station that would allow us to service the entire lake shore. This is great news for the Bosworth community, since there is no form of broadband available there at the moment. I'll post a follow-up with the results of the survey this weekend for those of you that are waiting.

Aspen is coming along perfec ...

Thats right, the Aspen community of Tulalip/Marysville is now online! We pulled a -75 dbi link with 3ms latency off the tower, 17 miles to the Point of Prescence, with a 2' parabolic grid antenna (lovingly nicknamed "The BBQ".) The 5.8Ghz Line of Sight link pulls a steady 7-8meg down and 5-6 meg up link.

That link then connects into the back of a 2.4Ghz 802.11b radio with a 15dbi omni to redistribute the backhaul link to the neighborhood. Ben grabbed some snapshots with his camera and will upload them when he gets back from his vacation next week.

Dennis and I go out tomorrow morning to test range on the client radios from the POP. I'll post results this weekend.

Special thanks goes out to Don for letting us locate on his property.

Regards,

Aaron

We took a property tour with the owner of the land for the potential tower location. The location is perfect as far as radio waves are concerned. It would give us direct line of sight to Lake Alyson, Canyon Drive, Mountain Loop, Pilchuck Tree Farm Road and most of Jordan and Arlington. The bad news is that there is no current way to get there other than Helicopter or Motorcycles. We need to find the forest service roads and easments that lead up to the ridge top and then get keys and such. We think there may also be a way up from the other side, but haven't found that yet on the maps. If we can gain physical access to the area it would be worth building out a tower with a weatherproof equipment box and solar power (since there is no power at the mountain top.) I will continue to keep you all posted on progress as we move forward.

The "Aspen" development in the Tulalip/Marysville area gets built out tomorrow (2/16/07). We have a number of customers waiting to be installed ...

Just a quick update, since it's late and I'm fighting a cold.

Tucson is coming along well. Bill has found a location for the antenna array and is tracking down a solid backhaul provider now. I will continue to update you all as things progress there.

Tomorrow we are driving up to scout a possible tower/relay station on the ridge north of Granite Falls, near the SERS tower. The location would allow us to pick up a few isolated areas like Canyon Road, Lake Alyson and the Pilchuck Tree Farm area west of Lake Bosworth. It would also provide better coverage to the Airpark and other surrounding areas. We will see how it turns out and keep you posted.

Regards,

Aaron