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May 2012
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WiFi

Brian’s DIY remote solar powered wireless Internet relay tower on El Crestone at Las Tusas Ranch

brians_tower.jpg
Testing the guy wires and my engineering.

Below me on the ground is my brother Jackson rolling a smoke while my dog Cujo observes my son Austin take a picture. We fabricated this tower from four inch square tube. Jackson welded rungs on the mast so I could get to the top of the twenty five foot tower. The batteries are inside an oak milk box which came from my childhood home in New Jersey. The battery box is covered by a reshaped microwave oven cover, lined with Styrofoam to maintain some facsimile of thermal stability as it gets 20 below zero plus wind chill up on the mountain. We welded a steel ring near the top of the tower to attach a body harness so I can have both hands free to work. The guy wires are anchored to rebar set in concrete in crevasses in the rocks.

Setting the PV frame in stone

Leveling the PV and battery rack

After we finished building the photovoltaic power system for our wireless Internet tower, Jackson and I hauled the equipment up to the Crestone and moved a a few large pieces of moss rock around to create a level area for the rack to stand. I have a feeling this is a one of a kind PV setup. I had a lot of fun building this system and it was even more fun to set it into the mountain so it doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb. The PV panels are forty eight inches wide and thirty inches tall. The panel is mounted on a steel frame made from 1.5 inch square tubing, in full sun the output is 2 amperes, not much power, but enough to keep a trickle charge on the two 33AH 12volt deep cycle sealed cell batteries.
The batteries are roughly the size of motorcycle batteries. They are set inside an antique oak milk box we believe is from my family’s home on Carnation Dr. in New Milford, New Jersey. Along with the batteries mounted in the milk box are the solar charge controller and a PoE (Power over Ethernet) adapter this is just a junction box with two Ethernet jacks and punch down connectors inside. The finishing touch is a microwave oven cover reformed into a weatherproof steel shed for the milk box battery case.
On the job
Looking serious about this new WiFi tower

Notice how little concrete we left exposed at the base of the tower. We tried to keep the worksite pristine.

New tower

The solar panel bracket in in place and level.

We cut quite a few trees to give us better LoS (Line of Sight) down the mountain toward our houses. I think we need to cut a few more to get better sunshine to the photovoltaic panels in the Winter. You can see in the image above that the trees will shade the PV panels as the sun moves into the late afternoon.

Happy boy
One proud do it yourselfer. Brian Rodgers

e will install the dual antennae on the High speed Internet. Plugged into the Ethernet jack at the base of the tower we did the preliminary router programming. It took Eric from Desertgate.com about 15 minutes to program the routers. We then sealed the cables inside the battery box. All the programming is now done as a Web Appliance. One day I hope to add a battery monitoring system which can be viewed from the Web as well.

Rootenna and grill

WiFi router and antennae on top the new tower.

Installed inside the RooTenna (the white box looking thing) is a MikroTik router and two CM9 radio cards. The grill is pointed toward a Desertgate WISP tower nearby. I probably did not need the grill since the next Wifi hop is less than a mile, but I had it and it was cheap. Most of the WiFi gear came from www.pacwireless.com/.

More WiFi stuff here


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