After a hard push to get new capabilities integrated into the M2N2, we rolled out yesterday morning to support the Sustainable Living Fair in Ft Collins. After a short drive we were in position at the Fair and set-up and running our wireless network in about 30 minutes. It took us another few hours to make the site look presentable, but we'll call that marketing time. Needless to say we were very happy with being able to roll in and be operational in 30 minutes. This is what our basic deployment looked like:

• M2N2 with living quarters etc. (including fridge with cold "sodas")
• Two solar powered remote wireless network nodes
• Load balanced 3G internet connection
• Weather data capture
• Over the Air digital TV
• Small field server (not running any services yet)
• Two laptops

Average power draw yesterday for the M2N2 was about 125 watts. We were seeing peaks up to about 150 watts when the laptop batteries were charging and then we settled into about a 100 watts to support operations. The solar panels were easily able to keep up with our demand, but as we expected we need more panels up top if we are to sustain via solar during marginal weather. We have our 2400 watt inverter generator to cover those times when solar will not perform well, but in the future we would like to have enough solar power to make the generator an emergency back-up rather than an operational requirement.

We were also pleased with network performance, but it can still use some throughput improvements between wireless nodes. We are seeing about 1kbps down and 386mbps up with the two 3G cards load balanced, but only about 11mbps throughput between our nodes. 11mbps is expected with 802.11b but we are not running any .11b devices, so we may set the radios to .11g only and see if we get improvements. Also, if we have time this weekend we will be flashing a few test radios with Open Mesh to see how it compares with our current station/access point deployment.

Overall a very good experience so far for this deployment. We'll have more after we load up the network with a few clients.