Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Wireless Mt. Washington

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 18:12:58 -0400

May 30, 2003
Wireless Mt. Washington
By Gerry Blackwell

The winter weather at the top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in New
Hampshire and in the whole northeast United States, is, in a word, foul.

On one record-breaking occasion, the wind speed measured at the Mount
Washington Observatory reached 230 miles per hour. While it may be true that
you can't fall off a mountain, in those conditions you could easily get
blown off one.

If Wi-Fi can work here, it stands to reason, it can work just about
anywhere. Thanks to some canny engineering by Robert "Hobbes" Zakon, chief
technology officer at Zakon Group LLC of North Conway, N.H., Wi-Fi does
indeed work here.

Zakon engineered a five-mile point-to-point shot using ORiNOCO
(http://www.orinocowireless.com)
equipment from Proxim to connect a remote Web cam to the Observatory's wired
frame-relay link to the Internet.

"Mount Washington is renowned for having the worst weather in the
northeast," Zakon says. "The highest ground wind ever recorded in the U.S.
was recorded there. It's a whole lot of weather -- snow, ice, winds.
Engineering a solution was a big challenge."

His firm, a consulting/engineering jack of all trades, counts wireless as
one of its specialties, but only one of many. "We work mostly with advanced
and emerging technologies," Zakon says.

Mount Washington Observatory is a non-profit weather research station. The
facility is shared by the US Forest Service and is also a tourist center in
the summer. The Observatory already had some Web cams in place to show
weather conditions on the mountain, but it didn't have any outside, and it
didn't have any that showed a key feature: the Tuckerman Ravine on the
southeast side, an area popular with spring skiers and summer hikers.

A Web cam would be a boon to the hikers and skiers. "Sometimes it's snowing
up there when it's a perfectly sunny day down below [in North Conway],"
Zakon says. "And you get some amazing cloud cover up there." If it was
properly done, if it could show enough detail, a Web cam might even be
useful in helping guide rescuers to avalanche survivors.

The Observatory secured a government grant to install a Web cam that would
show the ravine. Observatory members who use the recreation facilities on
the mountain also chipped in. Securing funds was the easy part, though. It
was left up to Zakon to solve the real problems: how to provision and power
a communications link 6,000 feet up a desolate mountain.

The logical place to put the Web cam to get the view the Observatory wanted
was across Pinkham Notch (a notch is a gap in a mountain range) at the
Wildcat ski area, a seasonal facility only open in late winter and early
spring.

Whatever communications technology they used, it would need power. The ski
area uses gasoline generators, which the Web cam station could also have
used -- but only during the short skiing season. The Observatory could also
have installed its own generator, but that would have meant hauling fuel up
the mountain in winter, which would be impractical.

That left solar or wind. Wind power involves moving parts exposed to
extremely high winds which could result in damage or jamming. Zakon went
with solar from SunWize Technologies of Kingston, N.Y.

An affordable system couldn't be counted on to provide continuous power year
round, but the communications and camera technology wouldn't need to be
switched on all the time as the plan was to transmit an image only every 15
minutes.

"We're not looking at people in an Internet cafe here," Zakon points out.
"Things aren't going to change that fast." So the system was engineered with
a photo-cell switch and timer that would switch the system on only during
daylight hours for three minutes at a time every 15 minutes.

That solved the power source problem.

Getting a phone line to the ski area was out of the question. The ski
operators use walkie-talkie-style radios for communications. While surveying
the area, though, Zakon noticed that he could see the roof of the
observatory from Wildcat. That meant fixed wireless was a possibility.

After researching the market, he decided the best bet was standards-based
2.4 GHz -- Wi-Fi. It provided the bandwidth required to transmit
high-quality images, it was inexpensive -- and going with a standards-based
solution would make it easier in the future to turn the Wildcat site into a
hub for a wireless network of remote stations feeding weather data.

Zakon considered off-the-shelf components from Young Design Inc. (YDI) and
HyperLink Technologies Inc., but in the end opted for the all-in-one-box
ORiNOCO Point-to-Point Backbone Kit, built around the OR-500 Outdoor Router.
(Proxim has since replaced this product with the Tsunami QuickBridge 11.)

The ORiNOCO gear barely met the five-mile range requirement, but a
single-vendor, pre-engineered solution was easier to sell to the
Observatory, which would be maintaining the system after Zakon got it up and
running. "ORiNOCO technical support said, 'Yes, it'll probably work,'" he
recalls. "We didn't get the warmest fuzziest feelings from ORiNOCO."

Zakon also gave careful consideration to an antenna, selecting a Yagi model
from ORiNOCO in the end. It had to be directional to reduce the potential
for interference with other RF activity on the mountain, including military,
government and broadcast. With a parabolic antenna, there would be the
possibility of ice accumulating in the dish and attenuating the signal. A
whip antenna would be too prone to snapping in the wind.

Placement of the antennas and radios was critical -- especially at the
Wildcat end where the camera would also be placed. Zakon found an ideal
spot. The ski area at one time had a gondola ski lift. The structure at the
top of the mountain remained. Zakon had a custom enclosure built for the
wireless, solar power and camera technology and mounted it in one of the
gondola bays.

At the Observatory end, he found he could mount the antenna and radio inside
in a window well behind hurricane-proof glass.

In the end, though, all the careful engineering amounted to best guesses as
to what the equipment could withstand in the way of weather. The Observatory
made the decision to go ahead and buy the equipment and test it this winter
before going live. As it happened, it was a good year to test -- it was one
of the worst winters in a long time. The network came through with flying
colors.

The camera is a Canon VC-C4 pan/tilt/zoom (PTV) model. It's controlled by a
purposely-built AXIS 2401 Video Server from Axis Communications, a Swedish
company, which allows an operator to control its angle of view and zoom the
lens in and out over the Internet.

To see output from the Wildcat Web cam, go to this page at the Mount
Washington Observatory site. To learn more about the engineering project and
see pictures of the technology in situ, go to this page at Zakon's site.

http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/2214541

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