So Cal Free Net.org

I finally got my antenna in Ocean Beach back up on a roof again, and an even taller roof than last time! Actual antenna height is about 5' or 6' taller than before.

I decided to use an old Senao/Engenius 200mW AP that I had laying around the house as a mast mount ap. Unfortunantly, I had 3 strikes against this plan to begin with. 1)The AP doesn't have an external antenna jack. 2)It doesn't have POE support. 3)It's not even a little bit "weatherized".

Problem #1 was solved long ago, as nested inside this compact unit is a standard Senao 200mW PCMCIA card with MMCX jacks. So I purchased an MMCX to N-male pigtail from FabCorp for about $18 plus shipping.

Problem #2 was somewhat easily solved by Michael Mee's early experimentation with homebrew poe however, after about 30 min of carefully placing the appropriate wires in the proper terminals and then double and triple checking to make sure I wasn't going to fry my little AP, I used the cat-5 tester Bill gave me to make sure. Nothing!! Not a single contiguous wire! Quite a bit of head-scratching later, I came to the conlusion that these terminal blocks only work with solid core wire, and my donated spool of cat-5 was stranded core!!! So, after carefully stripping the insulation back on each end of the wires, I applied a small amount of solder, effectivly making them solid core. After that, it worked great!

So I'm somewhat proud of everything up untill problem #3. This AP is meant to sit on a shelf, not be strapped to a pole. Time was of the essence, as my goal was to get this AP on the roof before nightfall, and I was burning daylight! To make a long story short, I removed the internals, started drilling holes in the case, threaded some zip ties through, put it all back together, coated the entire box execpt the bottom with adhesive aluminum (to keep out water and reflect as much sunlight as posiible) and then used some Dow Corning 732 Silicone to seal up the holes the zip ties were threaded through. Now this will work, and is still working, but I am a little worried about heat buildup, so time will tell. I'd imagine I will be replacing this in the near future with something a little more exciting anyway.

The mast I had made at work earlier in the day, it's an extremely simple design, made from some of the left over material from the La Cresta install many months ago. The pole is welded to a 5"x12"x3/16" steel plate and gusseted. I drilled about 10 3/8" holes and used 3/8" lag bolts to bolt the whole thing into the wood of a small overhang...that way I don't have to worry about drilling holes in a roof and leaking water. I ran the ethernet line out the bedroom window up to the roof. Simple yet effective. We'll have to see how this holds up. But it's 3pm on a warm (for the beach) afternoon and it's still up!