Travel:
- Arrived from a nice flight via Newark, landing at 0810. Waited for luggage.
- A nice guy at Hertz called for a driver to pick me up at the airport location and take me to the Hertz corporate location, where I rented a half-bed pickup (white!)
- Drove to Brico Depot for a few items (my GPS wouldn't navigate me, but there were billboards at every step of the way).
- Drove to site, arrived at seatainer at 12:20. Jose Carlos and Jose Palma arrived about 13:20.
Seatainer:
- Everything looked perfect. Some of the tub walls had collapsed a bit, so some ratchet straps weren't tight, but not a big deal. 4 pickup loads later, everything was in the ops center. Just removed tubs and a few other boxes. Everything else left in seatainer for now.
Ops Center:
- Got (one) key for the ops center ballroom, now on my keyring.
- We have use of the entire ballroom. Interior doors are unlocked to give us access to everyplace except the cafe. (Except that they have left the cafe interior door also unlocked to give me access to the networking connection tomorrow.) Only wall sconce lights turn on from inside ballroom. The overhead fluorescents turn on from the bar hallway.
- A beat-up seatainer is in the far corner of the parking lot as our "permanent" ops center. As of now, we don't have a key (Jose Carlos will pick one up shortly) and there is no power, communications cables, or furniture. Jose Carlos can get desks and chairs from a local school and see below about cables.
- Got agreement in principle to mount the WiFi access point on the upper roof. I have a plan which involves drilling unobtrusive holes in the ops center concrete wall. Jose Carlos prefers running its ethernet cable to the ops seatainer along the wall (involving drilling more holes) to keep it off the ground.
Communications:
- Connection in ops center cafe has WiFi access point connected, that connects to the world. Currently, this WiFi connection is unsecured and apparently is being enjoyed by locals.
- Did not have time to try a wired connection – on tomorrow's list.
- Have identified a metal plate used to mount the cafe's vent fan as the easiest place to cut a hole to feed a power and an internet cable to the ops seatainer.
- Several cable routing options are available to get these cables to the seatainer.
Towers:
- 100m: tse09 and tse13 are up (I visited both).
- 60m: rsw03, rsw07, and tsw10 are up (I saw all 3). I also saw the tower sections in place for tse11, ready to go vertical.
- 10/20/30m: saw concrete in place for tsw10, rne01, and rne02. Jose Carlos assures me that there are more.
- Although power lines have been installed, no towers had actual power drops from these lines.
- Jose listed the towers needing solar power. There are 16. He plans for INEGI to supply up to 9 solar panel systems, in addition to the 9 or 10 we've prepared. I note that we will have to make 4-pin AMP connectors for his systems to connect them to our DSMs. The list is: tse01, 02, 05, 06, 07, 14, 15; tnw02, 04, 05, 06, 08, 09; rne06; v01, 02, 03.
Tomorrow plan:
- Fix mote fuses
- Reprogram TP01 wisard boards
- Test wired networking addressing and throughput, including adding our own router
- Assemble and test everything needed for tse13 (100m tower used as first WiFi repeater).