The Hills Hub

The WaFreeNet is a community effort to build a free, public access 802.11b wireless network covering metro Perth (Western Australia). The first access point of the WaFreeNet to go online was the Hills Hub situated near Kalamunda. This access point services much of the metro area east of the city, but also reaches as far as Ballajura in the North. The evolution of the Hills Hub is documented in the 'old Hills Hub Page'.

The access point itself is a Compaq WL310. The packaging of the access point for outdoor operation is detailed separately. The antenna is a 180 deg, 14 dBi slotted waveguide designed by MikeN. Connected to the access point is a server PC known as the Hills Hub Server (HHS). The HHS provides several essential services needed to make best use of the access point.

If you want to connect to the Hills Hub, the most important issue is that you must have clear line of sight (LOS) between your location and the Hills Hub. There is a series of high resolution photos taken from the Hills Hub that might help to identify if you have LOS. There is also a map showing range and bearing information (132 KB). The Hills Hub field of view is estimated to be from about 60 to 135 deg on that map. The range may be up to 20-25 km depending on your equipment and LOS.

The Hills Hub is located at 31° 57' 43.746" South, 116° 02' 39.156" East (WGS84). This is roughly Easting 409689 Northing 6463389.8 (GDA94). Here's an Excel (Star office?) spreadsheet (28 kB) from Auslig for calculating the range/bearing between two lat/long points.

Your antenna will need to be horizontally polarised to match the slotted waveguide antenna. A directional antenna is recommended, such as a 24 dBi parabolic dish. In the first instance it may be beneficial to use NetStumbler to see if you can receive the Hills Hub (or any other freenet AP) signal. This software logs signal strength, etc while you wave your antenna in the direction of an access point.

Once you have a solid RF connection to the Hills Hub, set your card's SSID to "HillsHub". You should set your network interface to be configured automatically via DHCP. If you can establish a connection, the HHS will issue you an IP address (DHCP lease). You should then be able to ping the HHS (10.60.0.2). You will then have access to the IRC server on HHS (IP 10.60.0.2, Port 6667, channel #wafreenet), please drop in and say hello. You will also have access to the web server on HHS http://10.60.0.2/ (please sign the guest book, see others who have).

If you want to have a permanent connection to the Hills Hub, you will need to comply with the wafreenet IP plan. The first stage is to fill in this form to request a /30 subnet to connect you to HHS and email it to the address in the form example. This will give you one usable IP address on the wafreenet network. For many people this may be sufficient either for stand alone PCs or with the use of NAT. Other people may want more IP addresses on the wafreenet, to run servers, etc. Once you have connected to the HHS through your /30 subnet you may than optionally request an additional subnet to be allocated to you by filling out this form and email it to the address in the form example.

The Hills Hub Server (HHS)

The Hills Hub has a server PC hardwired to the AP. It is a Pentium II 333 MHz (GA-686LX3) with 64 MB RAM and a 20 GB & 80 GB HDD running Debian (woody). It has an Svec cradle, Roamabout card and a galaxy dish for a peer uplink. There is also a UPS with two new 7.2 A/h batteries. This setup was built one evening from hardware donnations from HH connectees, which is an impressive effort. Special mentions go to Marcus, Stygen, Radix, Zombie, PeterH, Swug, Mcduff & ChrisK (+ others). The box is jointly administered by ChrisK and Zombie.