Charles,
I have been intending to drop you and Cindy a note to ask you to do something for me for this exercise and your post affords me the opportunity to just do it publicly. I need some people to do a little bit of passive scouting. Tomorrow I am taking Kathy to an appointment in Paris. When I drop her off I am going to drive the full circle of the loop and look for anything with any elevation at all. Specifically I am hoping to see grain elevators, Ready Mix plants, whatever, at locations visible from the loop and hopefully outside of the loop. I will take pictures, get lat/long info for each and the name and address of the place if it is easy to determine. The names and addresses will be used later for researching who should get a targeted letter from us asking to put one of the devices at their location. And honestly, up on a tower makes it hard to service/replace, so I am hoping for some places that are a bit more accessible. Even just on a leg of a tower 10′ off the ground is fine for this exercise, so if you want to take a casual look at both spots and see if a railing or easy to reach spot is available, I want to avoid having to hire a tower climber for any of this .
What you and Cindy could do would be to just keep your eyes open on your way up from your southerly residence. When you are driving back and forth to Paris if you could try and do the same thing, no contact with anyone required, just make a list of the details above, that would be helpful. And I don’t need 100% accuracy on the lat/long, just close for me to plug into the model so we can see what it does for mesh coverage if we added a node there. Do either of you have an iPhone? If you do it has a compass built into it and on that page it gives lat/long details. Here is what it looks like:
Cliff, you could do the same thing going back and forth to Detroit, that would be great. I’ll be recruiting others to do it their direction. Kathy and I generally go into Paris via Tigertown and Hopewell (from the northwest) so I’ll scout that direction. If anyone north and west/southwest (George?) wants to volunteer, that would be helpful. As far south as you and Cindy are we probably need 3-5 places to start with. That will be my goal. I want to say that I will initially be looking for locations that are +/- 5 miles from each other. I will model the locations at 3 meters (9-10 feet) and see what that looks like and then we can add filler nodes as needed, reduce distances for node placement, etc.
The lat/long is the most important piece for initial modeling. If people take a picture and try and secure details like the name and address of whatever is tied to the spot, that would be helpful. But so long as you can get back to the place later to get those added details, the lat/long is really the important piece. Oh, and Charles, to that end if you could email me the lat/long of Atlas and the north EOC locations, I can plug them in right away. For OPSEC reasons since both are collocated with critical infrastructure let’s keep those details in email and not a forum post.
73
Phillip Beall (W5EBC)