In this area we will post events, announcements and updates. Check back often to see what is new.

[Preliminary news of the BLT-26 Balloon flight which carried HSMM-MESH]

Hi,
I built the mini-server on the back side of the mesh node in the balloon payload.  I was able to connect to it and get decent page refreshes beyond 40,000 ft altitude.  I was getting too many dropped packets to have a reliable connection when the path got out beyond my design specs, but a quick look at the data seems to be better than expected.

I was able to stay "locked" into the balloon node well beyond the 15 mile mark, but I need to do the range calculations to find the exact distances versus Rx strength.  The node stayed visible down to a very respectable -85 dB or more.

Quick looks makes me believe we will need about 15 dBm of gain margin to keep acceptable page refresh rates. At least we now know it is possible to link in an HSMM node from near space -- Woohoo!  Thanks to all for the good work in making this possible.

I will be sending the photos and screen grabs over to Andy, W5ACM for posting on the balloon site.

I will post more along with a few "lessons learned" as soon as I process the data.

Ron, AG5RS

New VOIP initiative underway. See the front page article for more info.

Austin Summerfest has come and gone. We had a vendor table in the big display area. Used mesh nodes were for sale along with active demos and lots of questions by attendees. The email inquires and requests to join the developers list are up as a result. Pretty successful all in all.

2010/04/28 Firmware version 0.3.3 is released

It is strongly recommended that you upgrade to the 0.3.3 firmware. There have been several usability and reliability enhancements, as well as a few more bug fixes. Here is an overview of the changes:

• fixed unconfigured node detection
• added the ability to bridge two meshes on separate RF networks
• added the ability to set the dhcp address range
• added more vendors to the wifi scan database
• added a sysinfo web page to collect data for development and debugging
• staggered the fcc id beacons so all nodes don't beacon at once
• the default dynamic gateway (internet sharing) is disabled by default
• the internal web server was moved to port 8080
• the internal ssh server was moved to port 2222
• the olsr pages now display ip address, hostname, and tactical name if available
  • fixed a problem with incorrect hostnames being displayed
• olsrd will restart if it stops for any reason
  • this is a workaround for an olsr 0.4.10 bug which causes it to die
• port forwarding enhancements
  • rules can be disabled without deleting them
  • tcp and udp traffic can be separately routed
  • port ranges can be specified
  • a dmz server can be specified

The main thing you will need to pay immediate attention to is that the node web interface has moved to port 8080 instead of the standard port 80. This means you will have to add ":8080" to the address you use to get to the node, like this:

http://localnode:8080

The documentation on hsmm-mesh.org has been updated to reflect the changes. Please review the "How to use the web interface" page in the User Documentation section to familiarize yourself with the new changes.

73
ad5oo