Wi-Fi setup for Camp Liahona

The first thing to do is pack up all your gear and get to this location using a GPS unit. It will guide your way just like having your own Liahona.

This sign is located at N38.6796, W123.2847

None of the devices were defective. The original problem turned out to be a weak signal path to North Star and as I suspected it looked like lots of growth was a contributing factor. I have moved that device around to the edge of the building as shown in the photo below.  That gave it about 10db more signal. If that doesn’t fix it then it will have to be moved to the end of the other building.  This also covers part of the camp across the river, especially where the bathroom building is.

Everything had been reset including the router inside the house.  Its memory was cleared about 7 weeks ago from what I could tell. It was now on a new subnet at 192.168.1.1 instead of 192.168.4.1 This seemed to work OK so I left it that way and fixed a couple of the other settings. 

Only WEP Encryption mode is used at the camp and that’s why it has a sort of long hexadecimal number.  This is because WDS linked access points do not support WPA mode. A WDS (wireless distribution system) allows the pico stations to be used as wireless repeaters.  This way, no long data cable or fiber optic runs are required but it’s not very fast either.

Mesh networking may be in the future. I looked at a document on how to flash the older Pico stations with Open Mesh. The camp has two older and one of the newer devices.  At some point, this might become more perfected and available on the newer M2 devices and maybe it would work at the camp. 

http://www.awmn.gr/content.php?r=217-How-to-Flash-Open-Mesh-%28and-all-Compatible%29-Routers

See Wikipedia article about mesh networking here.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking

The first of the three Pico stations had been set to 192.168.1.116 which might conflict with addresses given out by the router starting at 100 and going up.  That would be bad. The other two Pico stations were on the factory default setting of 192.168.1.20. There is a small reset button inside the lid next to the Ethernet cable connector that can be used to clear all setting such as whenever the settings get corrupted or you don’t know the password. The units from the kitchen and North Star had been swapped.

I have set them with the following IP addresses

House and office: 192.168.1.200
Kitchen: 192.168.1.201
North Star: 192.168.1.202

Old location.


New location.




Here is the new camp internet dish system.


Here are the settings for the three access points. All must be on the same channel which in this case is 2452 Mhz and all must have the same have the same SSID. The WLAN MAC is entered into the other station its connecting to.

House screens from Pico Station. 

 

Screens from Kitchen (This one is the newer Pico station M2) Notice it's set to 20Mhz bandwidth, required when
used with the older B/G only devices.

 

 

NorthStar.

Settings for the DD-WRT based router.

The security screen has a feature to generate hex keys by entering a pass phrase as a seed which in this case was Liahona. The first was picked for use on the three Pico stations and this is the camp wide wi-fi key.