[CUWiN] advice,

[Bill Comisky]

hi all,

We (CNT in Chicago) are going to try rolling out a CUWiN mesh for our 
community project in North Lawndale.  We've been able to get access to the 
old Sears Tower in the neighborhood, which is a 14 story tower with the 
roof at about 260 feet, see photos:

http://wcn.cnt.org/photos/2004/07/old-sears-tower/

Our plan at this point is to use a point-to-point 802.11a link from the
roof of the Homan Square community center which is providing the internet
connection (about 600 feet away) to the tower.  Then we're going to use
CUWiN with sector antennas from the tower.  We have good line of sight to
a large area from the tower.  We hope this setup will ultimately give us
the best user capacity for the tower as opposed to using it as just a big
access point.  Of course we will add more internet connected nodes as
needed.

I'm looking for any problems you can think of with this kind of setup.  
Is there a big hidden node problem here if several nodes can see the same
tower antenna but not each other (forgive my ignorance of the HSLS
algorithm!).  Also I wanted to ask about your network and if there are any
rules of thumb you have learned for things like optimal mesh density (how
far apart are your nodes? how many other nodes can each "see"?) or any
other best practices we can learn from before we start.

Bill

-- 
Bill Comisky
bcomisky at pobox.com