This year the Troy ARA (okay, yours truly) decided to dispense with the lengthy runs of Cat5e and wired up our 4 Field Day logging stations. The configuration had two nodes handling two logging stations each, and a third node connected to the main logging 'server'. A spare node was on hand, but was not needed.

https://twitter.com/k2mts/status/614873064921300993

RFI was a concern but did not affect the network at all. The only hiccup was during an overnight generator fuel swap, where one of the logging clients came up in local mode instead of network -- this was quickly resolved, and was not directly related to the network itself.

Some minimal smoke testing was done the night before FD (of course it was the night before) which proved that the setup could work. There was minimal risk because the Cat5 cable could have always been run as usual as a last resort.

I'm very pleased with how this experiment turned out, and look forward to using this solution again for many Field Day's to come. Maybe next year, an IP camera & node on top of our crank up tower?

Bonus teardown video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDjxesPuIbo

73

Mike K2MTS