November 1, 2007 Meeting Minutes
Meeting Attendees
Attendees: Craig Anderson, Bill Dale, Heather Stearn, Ian Kluft, Brad Douglas, Chris Swartout, Carl Reisinger, ??
Evening's Discussion
Thursday was the monthly meeting of SVWUX
at the Round Table Pizza on Stevens Creek in San
Jose. The room we used was OK, as Round Tables
go, but parking was a problem. So I have reserved
a room at the Round Table near Union and Camden
in San Jose for the next 3 months.
At this meeting was talked about the 2.4GHz dish
antenna that we worked so hard to install on the
San Jose EOC roof a few weeks ago. That Thursday
morning we got a call from the San Jose Police
radio shop, who has responsibility for all the radios
and antennas in the police building, saying that they
wanted us to remove the dish. They had installed
some satellite phone antennas on the roof and our
dish was blocking the southern sight-lines to the
satellite. This was a mix-up with the fact that they
gave us permission to install the dish but it took us
about 9 months before we could do the install,
and they installed their sat-phone antennas before
we installed our dish. I and Chris Swartout (San Jose
RACES Chief Radio Officer) will meeting with the
radio shop Monday to talk about future plans.
Given that this dish had to be taken down for the
time being, I have shifted my efforts of connecting
to the Los Gatos repeater over to completing the
installation of the computing infrastructure in the
San Jose EOC to be ready for the next issue.
There is an open invitation to demonstrate our
capabilities to the Santa Clara County EOC, where
we are planning to connect the County EOC to
the San Jose EOC with 802.11b (currently). We
have all the hardware we need to do this link,
but we need some significant effort in computing
infrastructure before we can try it. I have started
by installing an LDAP system (for basic user
authentication, which is installed), now I'm in the
process of installing a RADIUS server to extend
the LDAP user authentication to dynamic VPN
connections. There is a good bit of effort needed
in configuring the firewall to protect the San Jose
EOC networks from radio intrusion. Lastly, and most
importantly, is the routing protocol configuration
to route packets and provide resilience in the
face of link failure. If anyone wants to help with
this effort, please let me know.
We also talked about the Monterey Radio Fest that
is happening in February (
http://www.radiofest.org).
Both SVWUX and Stratofox are planning to give
presentations on our efforts and technology.
We had some wide-ranging discussions about
technology that would be useful in our Emergency
Wireless Network. For example:
Xastir can receive data from several sources;
a local GPS, incoming over the AX.25 radio, from
a remote aprsd over TCP/IP, or from a remote
Xastir program over TCP/IP. This will allow us to
have several computers/radios on our hill-top
sites listening to different frequencies where
each machine collects data on different "sectors"
of the south bay. Then any given user can take
input from any one or all of the aprsd daemons
on a number of hill-tops.
Another technology is the Tickets system. This
is an opensource Dispatch System that enables
tracking of teams dispatched on a mission
(through APRS data) and the equipment
they use. This could be incorporated with
the personnel resources database of a
RACES group to fully track deployments.
http://kolamiannapolis.org/tickets
We talked about using and adapting the Asterisk
VoIP? phone system as an autopatch system,
a general audio corss-bar switch that can
combine or link any set of audio streams, and
that can be used to record all the voice traffic
over any number of radio channels, including
time-stamps. I have a machine identified that
can be used for this.
http://www.asterisk.org
-- Main.craiga - 03 Nov 2007
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