I thought I wrote about this before but it doesn’t seem to show up anywhere. Tim Pozar gave an excellent presentation on how he and Matt Peterson built a wireless link from San Francisco to the Farallon Islands.

WMV and PDF available from NANOG49

The presentation will cover the requirements for a very limited budget and power consumption, issues of remote deployments, long distance microwave links over the ocean, sensitivity to the largest breeding colony the contiguous United States.

Additional network topics will be the requirement to support various services on the island via VLANs, fiber deployment to overcome distance and lightning, RF path calculations, “tuning” of the radio modulations schemes to provide the best up-time and remote support of a location that may only be accessible once a month.

Sailing around the Farallon Islands: Photo by me