Temporary removal of Anzio Catterick repeater

The Anzio Catterick repeater went down yesterday (13th September) for unknown reason, meaning it had to be brought back in to be reset, once this was done an attempt was made to redeploy it however this failed and the repeater fell however I caught it before it could hit the ground.

Weather forecasts (which often are not to be believed as the Met Office in the UK has a very poor track record) suggests high winds are forecast in the next few days so I will be leaving the repeater down until I can get it back up again once this weather has passed when I figure out what actually went wrong during redeployment.

With this in mind it is now more important than ever to get another repeater deployed locally as well, this will happen behind the scenes when circumstances and finances allow.

Anzio Catterick should be back on air in the next few days

Improved link across Yorkshire

The guys over at Yorkshire Mesh have put a MeshCore repeater up on Sutton Bank, which is the opposite side of Thirsk and also visible from here which means Anzio Catterick has seen it on zero-hop, and most traffic is being routed that way from my side rather than via YM--Catterick (which should be seeing Sutton Bank directly as well).

What this means it could in fact cover some parts of the former Richmondshire my own repeater is not able to cover, but also the former Hambleton District area as has proven to be the case with traffic I am receiving from Easingwold today, whether this will put a link in to Northallerton and Thirsk remains to be seen but that would be nice, I have seen traffic also from Stockon-on-Tees, this will be due to the height at Sutton Bank.

This is all very much an unexpected turn of events, I knew there had been talk about it amongst the Yorkshire Mesh but I didn't expect it so soon, as far as I can tell there's no coverage at all along the former Ryedale District or into the Borough of Scarborough but I am sure there's plenty of high spots in that area that can allow for connection across to Scarborough, imagine it being possible to communicate from here to someone over in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park or even on the Yorkshire Coast, all without mobile phone or internet connectivity.

Sutton Bank appears to link to Garrowby Hill as well, thus removing the weakness Anzio Catterick was suffering linking to YM Catterick then on to Garrowby Hill.

With the Sutton Bank repeater a major link has been created to the Richmondshire Mesh, if the repeater is using RAK4631 it will require hardly any attention provided a solar panel is plugged into to the baseboard, aside from firmware updates that the owner can do from a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone.

I'm always monitoring the public channel so do say hi if you are in range of mine or a Yorkshire Mesh repeater (or local in Catterick as I may hear you direct)

A possible loss to the link across the Pennines

While my plan was to run a mesh covering the former Richmondshire district I inadvertently found it was possible to link to the whole of Yorkshire (all 4 counties of Yorkshire) and beyond to Manchester and Merseyside via a repeater on Winter Hill (Winter Hill South if you have seen it advertise), the operator of that repeater has announced on the MeshCore discord that he is going to turn it off, citing mental health reasons, which to me I find somewhat strange as I have found working with MeshCore devices and MeshCore itself is actually beneficial to my mental health as it means I am focusing on something rather than the root cause of my problems, I personally feel that if this individual does have mental health problems then if he feels he needs to step back then absolutely that choice is his.

This doesn't mean the end of a wide area link, far from it, all the Yorkshire Mesh repeaters including YM-Catterick which I have made an honourary member of Richmondshire Mesh as it is in the coverage area, are still there, there are repeaters located up in Stockton-on-Tees and Yarm which we may also be able to link into, opening the possibilty of coverage across the North East of England though between Stockton and Sunderland the MeshCore landscape appears to be empty, in fact the next repeater north after the Teesside area repeaters are in fact located on the wrong side of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

As I am planning on promoting MeshCore heavily around my local area I am also thinking about getting the Amateur radio clubs involved as a lot of Amateur radio guys and gals, not just myself, use MeshCore (I had a chat with one briefly in Bradford today as it happens on MeshCore, proof this system can work over amazing distances when it wants to which is why I liked the link from Winter Hill being there, getting into Manchester.

The local radio club is a good spot for a repeater, it is in my plans to put one there (see repeaters page), but just anywhere high to put a repeater is good no matter where it is, this could well enable communications over a vast area, and I for one am for that as should this country's mobile phone infrastructure fail, MeshCore will be there no matter what as it is entirely off-grid, so I welcome long-distance links into the Richmondshire Mesh.

The Anzio Catterick repeater has proven itself on a temporary antenna, it works, it can access the wider mesh, the antenna will be changed for a better one as soon as that can be done, it is a shame that this will now take place after the loss of a link over to Manchester but we still have a massive chunk of Yorkshire in range, my chat with people in Bradford have proven this.

Link issue between Anzio Catterick and YM-Catterick

The link between Anzio Catterick and the YM-Catterick repeater deployed by someone as part of the wider Yorkshire Mesh is sadly not that great with the repeater as configured and is very hit and miss if it works at all, as the repeater has guest access to the stats I was lucky enough to be able to look at this via Anzio Catterick of course and this revealed the problem, the signal strength between these two repeaters is very low, around -126dBm meaning it is more than likely below the noise floor to the degree that Anzio Catterick is struggling to hear it but it does on occasion hear it

The above image is as far as I got with the information, I only needed the SNR and RSSI values anyway to try and get to the bottom of what is going on, which means an antenna swap for Anzio Catterick is an absolute must considering it is currently running on a Paradar whip meant for the companion radios, when YM-Catterick does push a flood advert it is 50/50 if Anzio Catterick sees it, also I don't know what antenna is on this repeater and that too could be having an influence.

When I get a burst of traffic it is often one of two repeaters as the last hop before Anzio Catterick, these are either YM-Catterick or YM-Garrowby_Hill as both are seen by Anzio Catterick as zero-hop and very similar signal strength, the latter repeater is somewhere between York and Driffield and that is a fair distance away and the signal off that one is poor as to be expected.

I will look into expediting the antenna swap if that is feasible to do and update soon

Anzio Catterick commissioned and the mysterious YM-Catterick discovered on the MeshCore internet map

The Anzio Catterick repeater is now commissioned, though it will be coming down for an antenna swap in a few weeks as all it is using right now is a Paradar indoor antenna which should be OK for now, however this repeater has now established linking to Manchester at best, a repeater on the far side of Manchester (Warrington direction from what I can tell from map information) advertised on flood and worked its way through the mesh to myself, a trip of 69 miles(!) which is certainly not bad at all.

Also tonight I discovered the existence of "YM-Catterick", this is a repeater that according to the map is randomly deployed in some woodland at the Scotton and Tunstall end of Catterick but this might not be its actual location, but I am aware it is there and it will help add to the Richmondshire Mesh a lot and help the mesh expand beyond Richmondshire, as I write this I have not heard a peep out of it ping wise, but it has been routing traffic as "<unknown repeater>", of course as soon as it flood adverts then Anzio Catterick will see it as a zero-hop neighbour, default flood advertisement times are usually every 3 hours, direct is either disabled or at least hourly, if you are reading this and are the owner of "YM Catterick" I would love to hear from you and I am monitoring the public channel so please do say hi and we can have a chat there.

Anyway, that's all for this update to the mesh operations, I'll hope to catch you on the mesh very soon

Anzio Catterick repeater tested in situ

The Anzio Catterick repeater made it on air in what will be its permanent home, the radio hardware currently only has an antenna meant for indoor use on it but when it went up I was hearing station adverts from Easingwold, Bradford and Huddersfield, along with some activity in the public channel for the first time since my brief chat with Andy M1SDE (who has also set up a repeater as I discovered on an Amateur radio club night out on the 20th August but at his home QTH which is in a bit of an awkward location so I never heard an advert from it via the Anzio Catterick repeater when I put this up).

The repeater was removed from location after about an hour because I was not convinced the way I had mounted it was going to be safe so I am going to work on this and get it back up to test overnight and see what happens, also a wander arouund town once it is up to see where I can get into it, granted we're getting to that time of year where the weather is starting to get a bit rubbish I think it's worth a test, I will repeat the test when I swap the antenna over when I can get hold of one.

While it was and still is my intention to establish a local mesh in the area if I can connect to other neighbouring meshes then that is certainly a good thing because the wider the coverage of MeshCore as a whole the better it is especially if disaster strikes such as a nationwide power cut because these devices run of batteries with charging via solar panels and powerbanks, I have been informed that there is work on a link between West Yorkshire and Manchester and I am aware that there is a repeater on Winter Hill where a broadcast transmitter is also located, but for obvious reasons (Arqiva being a greedy bunch and wanting £1000s a day in rent per transmitter as well as the high output of the broadcast transmitters) a MeshCore repeater wouldn't be on that mast unless it had some seriously good filtering which is a complicated subject delving into RF engineering, but it would be great to chat to people over in Manchester and possibly over to Cheshire and Merseyside, maybe even the Fylde Coast, from right here in sunny (or not so sunny) Yorkshire, worth thinking about that.

Anzio Catterick repeater to be commissioned in the coming weeks

The first main repeater of the Richmondshire Mesh, Anzio Catterick, is expected to be commissioned in the next couple of weeks, an order will be placed with zerofox3D for the Hermes enclosure, a solar panel and some 18650 cells plus a charger for these will be ordered from Amazon at around the same time, as a temporary measure the antenna on the repeater will be the Paradar indoor antenna I currently have until a proper outdoor one can be obtained later, the solar panel will be for charging, the 18650s are for overnight operation.

As the repeater is based on RAKWireless WisBlock hardware then current consumption is expected to be low and the batteries are expected to last without the repeater ever powering down, it can also be OTA updated via Bluetooth as required (the BLE antenna will be installed on the repeater for this purpose).

Anzio Catterick is to be located at my home address and should in theory cover from the far side of the Allenby Road estate to the Richmondshire Walk shopping area, I will be taking out the spectrum analyser with an 868MHz antenna fitted and one of my companion radios to run tests, of course this all depends on where I mount the repeater and ultimately how high up it is and also what antenna is on it at the time.

Once this is commissioned I can then set to work on building the next repeater I want to deploy which will be CRDARS Hudswell, using identical hardware to Anzio Catterick and should in theory cover a link over to Richmond and potentially being at a higher location fill in some gaps that Anzio Catterick can't manage to do.

So lets get this mesh built