N1WBV.net

Presenting at HamX 2026

2026-07-13T00:00:00-04:00

I am presenting at HamX 2026 this year talking about LoRa and Ham Radio. As for some reason (probably my own fault) my synopsis was chopped off, so I sound like a idiot who submitted one sentence.

This presentation examines how the amateur radio community is embracing LoRa (Long Range) radio technology as an exciting new frontier in digital communications, bringing modern networking capabilities to the ham radio world. Licensed amateur radio operators have long been at the forefront of emergency and experimental communications, and platforms like MeshCom, MeshCore, and Meshtastic represent a natural evolution of that tradition — leveraging LoRa's impressive ability to transmit signals at very low power levels over several miles on license-free and amateur radio bands. MeshCom, developed by and for the ham radio community, integrates seamlessly with established amateur radio infrastructure such as APRS and existing repeater networks, while Meshtastic offers hams an accessible entry point into mesh networking using affordable off-the-shelf hardware. For amateur radio operators, these technologies open up new possibilities for public service, EMCOMM (emergency communications), and experimentation — extending the reach of mesh networks across vast distances, linking nodes into club and regional networks, and providing a resilient, infrastructure-independent communications backbone that embodies the core values of amateur radio: self-sufficiency, technical innovation, and service to the community.

If this seems like it may be your thing, please check my out Saturday, 1PM, at Boxborough, W5.

June 2026 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2026-06-09T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the June 2026 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

April 2026 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2026-04-21T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the April 2026 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

Feburary 2026 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2026-02-10T00:00:00-05:00

Here is the recording from the Feburary 2026 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

January 2026 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2026-01-14T00:00:00-05:00

Here is the recording from the January 2026 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

November 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-11-19T00:00:00-05:00

Here is the recording from the November 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

October 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-10-12T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the October 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

September 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-09-10T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the September 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

August 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-09-09T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the August 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

July 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-07-12T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the July 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting, in which you get to see me say the wrong month. Again.

June 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-06-21T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the June 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting, in which you get to see me say the wrong month!.

May 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-05-29T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the May 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

April 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-04-15T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the April 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

March 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-03-14T00:00:00-04:00

Here is the recording from the March 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

Feburary 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-02-11T00:00:00-05:00

Here is the recording from the Feburary 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable meeting.

January 2025 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2025-01-16T00:00:00-05:00

Here is the recording from the January 2025 New England Mesh Rountable meeting.

December 2024 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2024-12-13T00:00:00-05:00

Here is the recording from the December 2024 New England Mesh Rountable meeting.

November 2024 New England Mesh Roundtable Recording

2024-11-14T00:00:00-05:00

I have started running a monthly roundtable for New England Hams into Mesh Networking. Particularly AREDN and the like. Here is the recording from the November meeting last night.

Response to the NextNav FCC Petition

2024-08-11T00:00:00-04:00

I am fairly active on 33cm (900 MHz), and the FCC just let everyone know that some company just went "Hey! Nice allocation there! Wouldn't it be better if we had it instead?" Needless to say, I was perturbed, and the proposed allocation would make most of the ways I use 900 MHz illegal.

I can become a bit... motivated when I am perturbed and so I went spent way too much time reading FCC filings and composing a very long winded comment but (I feel) well researched comment. I will be submitting it shortly but posting it here for posterity.

I am currently licensed as an Amateur Extra Class Operator, N1WBV , a member of the Amateur Radio Relay League, and an active user of the 902-928 MHz band (33cm band). I would respectfully request that the FCC reject the petition from NextNav Inc. (NextNav) as it will irreparably harm Amateur Radio operations in the 33cm band, especially FM and digital operation using Part 90 equipment reconfigured for Part 97.

Over the past two decades, the 33cm band has seen a large amount of growth within the Amateur community. This growth has been accelerated by the experimentation of Amateurs in Southern New England and Southern California working with the United States military in its use of the 420-450 MHz band (70cm band) with its Precision Acquisition Vehicle Entry Phased Array Warning System (PAVE PAWS) radiolocation service. The Amateur community coexisting and working with PAVE PAWS has been a partnership since 2006, predating NextNav’s founding. By eliminating significant amounts of equipment in the 70cm band in Southern New England and Southern California to support the military’s use of PAVE PAWS, Amateurs in those areas looked for other opportunities and bands to support communications projects.

Amateur use of the 33cm band is one the community and the Commission should be proud of. Realizing that commercial radio equipment certified under Part 90 of the FCC rules support frequency bands just above and below the 33cm band allocation, several experiments were conducted by Amateur Radio operators to determine if the equipment could be reconfigured for use under Part 97 within the 33cm band itself. Certain models of radios and equipment were found to be easily modifiable to utilize the edges of the 33cm band, transmitting at approximately 902 MHz and receiving at approximately 927 MHz. This allowed the equipment to be used under Part 97 and the 33cm band to be easily used by Amateurs. This information was shared across the Internet and demonstrated that the 33cm was a lot more accessible than previously thought.

Once this information was discovered and disseminated, the growth of 33cm started to take off. In Southern New England, Amateurs have further experimented with setting up a large scale linked repeater network from scratch using both digital (P25) and analog (FM) voice modes over both RF and Radio over IP (RoIP) services. The New England Amateur Radio 900 MHz (NEAR-900) Network consists of eighteen repeaters in three states, with coverage into all Southern New England states. This effort has been funded out of pocket by Amateurs and is truly a great example of what can be done by the Amateur community.

The 33cm band experimentation is a shining example of the purpose of Amateur Radio as defined by Part 97.1(b) and Part 97.1(d). Several Amateurs have advanced the art of radio by finding new “off label” uses for equipment and also have given many Amateur Radio operators, myself included, experience with Part 90 equipment, learning how to use, configure, and troubleshoot them as well.

One of the less touted success stories that I personally find notable about this effort in the 33cm band is what I deem “technology reclamation”, namely the reuse of used Part 90 equipment that has been deemed surplus by the original buyer. By using equipment that is no longer acceptable for use in mission critical situations such as public safety or critical infrastructure, Amateur Radio operators have saved tens of thousands of pounds of equipment from the scrap pile and turned into electronic waste (e-waste). In this day and age of electronics that are considered disposable, this is a model that should not just be acknowledged but celebrated and replicated.

In addition to digital and analog voice modes, the 33cm band is also active in digital data networks as well. The Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network project is doing its own kind of technology reclamation and taking Part 15 WiFi devices and using custom firmware to modify those devices for use under Part 97. Some of these devices use the 33cm band which is exceptional for longer range links where 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz are incapable of working. This equipment utilizing this band can be critical for establishing data links during a disaster.

Finally, separate from Amateur Radio, there has been a nascent grassroots effort with Part 15 devices in the 33cm band using the Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) LoRAWAN specification by the LoRA alliance. The Meshtastic project, aiming to create a “open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices” is becoming popular among non-licensed citizens. On an average day, there are approximately 2500 Meshtastic nodes across the continental United States connected to the Internet and many others that are independent of the Internet. This is an excellent tool for not only Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education but is also starting to be leveraged by the Amateur community as a gateway into the Amateur Service as well.

If the FCC grants NextNav’s petition for reconfiguring the 33cm band, it will result in all these efforts being destroyed by a stroke of a pen. NextNav’s petition labels the 33cm band “underutilized” and handwaves away Amateur Radio concerns in a single sentence stating “Updating the Lower 900 MHz Band M-LMS framework will not impede amateur operations.” I am saddened that NextNav tries to make it seem like the Amateur community doesn’t care about the 33cm band by pointing to an ARRL post and editorial about our secondary allocations above 420MHz. NextNav states that it understands “that most (if not all) non M-LMS equipment is frequency agile and (2) a contiguous 11-megahertz block will still be available for non-M-LMS operations—without any co-channel operations from NextNav.” This statement demonstrates a lack of “ground truth” as to the current types of utilization of the 33cm band that has been described in this comment.

In addition to this, NextNav states in their petition that “coexistence… should be achievable” with Part 15 device and that they are “completing technical analysis to address… Part 15 usage.” The phrasing used by NextNav suggests that their research into Part 15 devices is incomplete. This, combined with their lack of understanding of the current state of the 33cm band indicates that they have spent more time considering what works for their company rather than what works for the spectrum as a whole.

If the Commission grants NextNav’s petition, the slivers of spectrum at the top and bottom of the 33cm band that Part 90 equipment can effectively use under Part 97 will be reassigned to NextNav. This will obliterate the success that the Amateur community has had on 33cm and drop the utilization of the 33cm band significantly lower than current use. This is not in the best interest of effective Spectrum management. In addition to this the reassignment will cause thousands of pounds of e-waste to be generated as any Part 90 equipment modified for use under Part 97 for the 33cm band will become useless, which is not in the best interest of environment as well.

I respectfully recommend that NextNav's Petition for Rulemaking be denied.

Thank you

Benjamin Jackson, N1WBV

If you are active in 33cm, or just want to take an active role in throwing elbows for our allocations, I would recommend that you file a comment. Please feel free to use any of my research.

A Mast Grows in Dartmouth

2023-10-15T00:00:00-04:00

I have never had any kind of "permenant" installation at my QTH. Since I had a house, my office has been subterranian, leading me to either have a setup that is mobile or something that can be carried out to the deck and quickly set up and torn down. This has led me down some more intresting aspects of the hobby including being into satellites where I could set up a handheld Yagi antenna, work something overhead for about 15 minutes, and then trot back into the house and go back on with life. However, I yearned for something of a more permenant nature. When my wife and I decided to redo our basement in 2020, part of the request was three runs of coax to my office. This was dutifully installed by the electrician. I had the radio, I just needed a antenna. Simple, right? Some wire, a BALUN, raise... I can do that. I don't need to waste money on buying it!

And there the coax sat. Gathering dust.

Over a year later I finally admitted my lack of time to sit down and, ya know, build an antenna was my constraint. So I just went on eBay and bought on of the countless cheap dipoles that are built by some random person who has more time than I. Cop out? Yes. Was I going to lose another winter of being without an antenna otherwise? Also yes. Once the antenna arrived I went out in what felt was the last warm day in December 2021 and "temporarily" lashed a piece of PVC to my deck and used a throw weight to string up some ropes into the trees. My wife ignored the yellow wire visible across her kitchen window and I was in business.

Now, in April of this year, the cheap antenna showed why it was so cheap and started to be squirelly on its SWR. As April wore on into May, it was decided the deck needed to be painted, so my mast needed to come off. Plus, I still had two unused pieces of coax that were just sitting there. So I took this as an opprotunity to design something a bit more permenant. My wife has always cringed when I pointed out the free standing towers that I see on other Hams' houses so I proposed, and she trepedatiously accepted, a small-ish mast on the back side of the deck. With the approval I started looking for options online.

I have always been a big fan of PVC. Beyond the intended use of piping, I find them to be a combonation of tinker toys and legos for adults. I have built a number of Yagis with them and I felt comfortable working with it. The project I kept coming back to was N3HNA's design which met most of the criteria I was looking for. I didn't like his "I used stuff I had hanging around" because that's not a particularly good pattern to follow, but I felt that the design was more or less solid. I set out to work.

A solid foundation

The first step I took was to make something I could attach my mast to. I didn't want to use the exisitng deck, so I decided to instead, just install a 8 foot fence post into a conrete base. The New England rocky soly didn't let me go down the three feet I wanted to, so I settled on two and a half.

Next, I set the post in with gravel and approximately 200lbs of concrete, plumbed it, and secured it with two 2x4s for support it while the cement cured.

A week later, I began to assemble the first half of the mast, putting a 2" PVC pipe directly attached to the post. I spray painted the PVC green in an attempt to make it look a bit more presentable and for some UV proteciton and then used PVC cement to attach a cap in order to not have water leak into the pipe itself. While I didn't think it would affect anything, why take chances? I also removed the 2x4s and filled used some gravel to neated up the hole a bit.

Once done, I took the pipe and attached it to the post with two quarter in lag screws and attached my Ed Fong DBJ-1. VHF/UHF side complete!

Next, the hard part. For my the HF side I wanted to put it up 20 feet and that required two PVC pipes attached to each other. N3HNA's instructions are a bit vague on this, so I want to call this out PVC cement is not enough to keep the pole upright and attached. N3HNA's instruction makes it seem that his metal pieces were a good idea, and I just want to go on record that some kind additional supports are requirements. I went with lag screws again that I attached at 120 degree offsets at the point where the reducer touches the top and bottom of the PVC pipes

To make it easy to access the dipole, I added a pulley and a carabinerto the top of the 2" PVC right below the cap. This would allow me to raise and lower the dipole without needing to take down the mast. As I noticed the PVC bent over time when I had it lashed to my deck, I added a coupe of eye hooks to the post and the top of the PVC mast to connected with paracord to try to counteract the weight of the dipole. Finally, with the help of my son, atached the mast to the post with three quarter inch lag screws.

Success! A week later, some grounding, and we were in business! Now to see how it does in regular use!

Flashing AREDN on a MikroTik HP ac Lite (RB952Ui) with RouterOS v6.48.6

2023-09-10T00:00:00-04:00

I have been tinkering with AREDN as of late when I saw that they supported some of the GL.inet line of devices, which I enjoy as they are cheap, fairly well engineered, designed on top of OpenWRT. I am, unfortunately, 10 miles away from the nearest node and I think tunneling is "cheating" so I am slowly bootstrapping myself into a "local mesh" to experiement. I saw from forum posts that the Mikrotik hAP AC series of devices were a popular device to use and seemlingly recommended as the best "home node" so I recently purchased a hAP AC Lite (RB952Ui) off of Amazon.

Taking it out of the box and starting to read the flashing guidelines I realized I was spoiled by GL.iNet's embrace of OpenWRT where the flashing process was "upload firmware, press flash, wait, done". Nonetheless, I am good on TFTP, netbooting, and such. What gives me heartburn is warnings in the AREDN Instructions that say...

OpenWRT firmware (and therefore AREDN®) may experience a boot loop during installation of the sysupgrade file on Mikrotik devices with RouterOS v6.45.8 or newer.

...and a big warning on the OpenWRT Page that states...

OpenWrt is not compatible with the bootloader of RouterOS v7 or v6.46 or above. Do NOT upgrade the firmware on your device past RouterOS v6.45.8 or, if you did, downgrade to RouterOS Firmware v6.45.8 or earlier before installing OpenWrt.

...especially when my system is running RouterOS 6.48.6.

Thankfully, OpenWRT does have a pretty good explainer on how to downgrade the system and I downloaded the right files, uploaded them to the system, and merrily typed the requisite commands into the terminal. All was well, until I told the bootloader to downgrade...

Do you really want to upgrade firmware? [y/n] y
ERROR: can not change firmware to this version, please try newer one

Oh poop.

After having a minor panic attack thinking I wasted $60 on a device that now was useless to me, I cracked my knuckles and started researching the error message. Sadly, most references to it were buried in extremely long OpenWRT forum threads that never had a clear answer. I finally did find a reference that said "yeah, I put OpenWRT on a system that ran v6.48.6." but with no clarification on how many goats to sacrafice, the models of the ceremonial knives used, or what techniques used. Undaunted, I opted to take my chances that I was going to be one of the lucky ones in that "may" statement from AREDN.

I opted to take a more scenic route and decided to take my device and flash "vanilla" OpenWRT as a first step. This, I rationalized, would give me a better chance of having a successful flash from RouterOS to a non MikroTik operating system. I used the OpenWRT Instructions and TinyPXE to push the initial firmware image and then used the sysupgrade image to flash the bootloader. It took (what I felt was) a lot longer than what I was used to flashing the GL.iNet devices and I exhaled when the USR light went solid and I was able to see the familiar LuCi control panel. After cold booting it a few times to make sure the firmware image had "stuck" and that I wasn't accidentally booting off of a image in RAM somewhere, I logged into LuCi and flashed it with the AREDN firmware. Again, after waiting what seemed to be a long time, it did flash successfully and I am in busiess on my hAP AC Lite.

One thing that I did notice is that the device did seem to lock up about five minutes after its first boot into AREDN. I didn't do any kind of extended troubleshooting into it while it was in that state as I just groaned, thought I messed it up, and just power cycled it. It has been behaving since.

So, I can state that with RouterOS Firmware v6.46.8, you successfully reflash it with AREDN on a RB952Ui. Was I lucky? Maybe. But I wanted to post this out here to try to give a more definitive answer for other users who may be having the same heartburn I did while reading those incredbily long OpenWRT threads.

The Typical First Post

2023-08-15T00:00:00-04:00

Hello and welcome to my corner of the web. A little about me almost ripped wholesale from my QRZ.com bio: I have always been into radios ever since I was young, first listening to my father's police scanner and later my grandfather's old Hallicrafters SX-110. I was first licensed at 15 in 1995 Technician. I was fairly active on 2M during high school, and continued in college as a member of the Northeastern University Wireless Club (W1KBN). After graduating college in the early 2000s and becoming an "adult" with those "responsibilities", I ended up drifting in and out of radio every few years or so. After outlasting the Morse code requirement, I earned my General in 2007 and my Extra in 2009. I'm currently back into the hobby as of about 2021 and enjoying it thoroughly.