Blog

April 10, 2026

The regional emergency data network just took a major leap forward. This week, we successfully completed a critical installation at the San Juan Capistrano Public Works facility, further hardening the communications backbone for our Tri-Cities area.

The Mission: Reliable, High-Speed Data

In an emergency, voice communication is vital, but the ability to transmit high-speed data—VOIP, video feeds, and large file transfers—is what allows an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) to function at modern standards. Our goal for this phase was to integrate San Juan Capistrano more deeply into the existing AREDN (Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network) mesh that already serves the Dana Point EOC & City Hall, Dana Point Community Center and San Juan Capistrano Community Center.

The Installation

Working alongside our municipal staff partners, we spent the afternoon on-site navigating the “under the hood” infrastructure of the Public Works building. The job involved:

• A Cable Run: Pulling shielded Ethernet through existing conduits to ensure long-term durability and weather resistance.
• The Hardware: Installing a high-gain 5.8 GHz wireless dish designed for high-bandwidth, point-to-point communication.
• Alignment: Precision-pointing the dish toward our regional hubs to maximize signal integrity.

Results: “Five-by-Five” Digital Performance

Every technician hopes for a smooth deployment, but this one exceeded expectations. Upon final termination and alignment, we achieved 100% link quality on the very first attempt. A 100% link means we have a crystal-clear, rock-solid connection between San Juan Capistrano and the broader mesh network. This link now provides a high-speed digital “bridge” connecting Public Works, City Hall, and the Dana Point EOC, ensuring that if traditional internet or cellular services fail, our city leaders and emergency responders can remain connected.

Why This Matters

A huge thank you to Joe for the assist on the install and to the City of San Juan Capistrano for their continued support of amateur radio emergency communications.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to expand the mesh across the Tri-Cities RACES area.

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Bill Kreutinger, KM6SLF Chief Radio Officer / Technical Director Tri-Cities RACES

San Juan Capistrano recently purchased several cameras to replace aging equipment used by Tri-Cities RACES. These will allow volunteers to better provide valuable surveillance of public spaces during city events, contributing to the safe enjoyment of city events by all.

The cameras are in the final steps of being set up for use on AREDN and a thorough review will be created after set up and first-round testing is completed.

Tri-Cities RACES greatly appreciates the strong partnership we have with San Juan Capistrano and the city staff we work with there.

Various access points and routers had AREDN firmware installed on them last week and were delivered this week to the Dana Point EOC for deployment to strategic facilities in support of the Dana Point AREDN expansion.

Tri-Cities RACES is grateful for the growing partnership of Dana Point Emergency Management and all staff currently and yet to be involved.

The AREDN Portable kit has a couple new additions:

A Stratum 1 NTP server. Available on the mesh at: http://km6slfntp.local.mesh/index.html

This is built on a Raspberry Pi CM4 module, and takes advantage of the PPM feature that isn’t available on the regular Raspberry Pi 4. This allows it to obtain and maintain far more accurate time. Detailed build instructions are available on the mesh here: http://km6slfntp.local.mesh/instructions.html

Maintaining accurate network time is critical for a couple of reasons. Computers and devices that aren’t on the same or very close to the same time don’t play well with each other. You may have experienced this if you booted up an old computer, connected it to your router but still couldn’t reach the Internet. Computers don’t ‘trust’ other devices that think it’s a different time or date.

Maintaining accurate time is also valuable for evidentiary and investigative purposes. Inaccurate timestamps on camera recordings can cause confusion or invalidate potential evidence, and time stamps on files moved or edited help make sure emergency workers are working with the right data when it matters most.

The other recent addition is a Raspberry Pi running Victron’s Venus OS. This allows remote control and monitoring of the battery and solar charging system.

General and Regional AREDN news:

If you have a 2 GHz node, check to see if you are using the BroadbandHamnet SSID. If so, you may have noticed a reduced number of nodes or had issues connecting. The critical regional Saddleback node’s 2 GHz equipment was switched to the AREDN SSID, harmonizing it with the 3 and 5 GHz SSIDs. I recommend switching all 2 GHz equipment intended for use on the regional network to use the AREDN SSID.

Additional devices are having AREDN firmware developed for them. Firmware for these devices is currently available in the nightly build section of the arednmesh.org site (https://www.arednmesh.org/content/nightly-builds), and I expect stable releases for new devices to be released with the next stable firmware update, which I anticipate being available within the next 2 months or so.

I’m currently evaluating a Mikrotik hAP AC3.

For February 22nd’s San Clemente Public Safety meeting agenda Item 9A, the committee unanimously supported a motion asking City Council to instruct staff to support the deployment of AREDN and other equipment Tri-Cities RACES needs to best provide communications support to the city.

9A: Tri-Cities RACES Emergency Data Network Facility Plan

Report by Deputy Community Development Director and consideration of a recommendation to City Council to permit the installation of RACES/AREDN antennae equipment on City properties.

This kit 🙂

It’s the upgraded version of the kit shown in a prior post, leveraging the consolidated services cluster described in another subsequent post. It incorporates all the services provided before, but includes a Winlink client and over 6.3 million articles from Wikipedia. It does more with less power – about half what the prior kit required. It still supports 24V PoE output for connection to a higher powered dish or sector node.

With the space savings from using fewer SBCs, I was able to incorporate 2x 16 A/h LiFePo4 battery packs, providing about 400 Watts of usable power. A USB-C PD 20v trigger module is used in conjunction with a Victron solar charge controller to conveniently charge and monitor the batteries and the power load.

The kit can be powered from pretty much any source, including portable and household commercially installed solar panels, car cigarette lighters, other 12V batteries or AC with any USB-C PD capable charger. The kit will run up to about 20 hours on battery power, depending on usage.

The kit is designed to run “headless” and not to be actively monitored, but additional workstation capabilities can be accessed when needed. I’m putting together kits that would make this case a fully functional emergency coordination workstation with a display, keyboard, mouse, CD/DVD RW drive, scanner, VoIP phone and camera.

Another module would incorporate a mobile radio, allowing Winlink to work over long distances without requiring access to Winlink’s AWS servers and to allow for UHF, VHF and HF voice communications by authorized users.

In partnership with KK6LZB from LNACS, I’ve put together a highly integrated, ruggedized and power-sipping server for use on the regional emergency data network. A single Raspberry Pi 4, safely overclocked in a CoolerMaster Pi Case 40, offers connected users the following digital services:

• Mesh Email
• Winlink Email
• Voice, Video & Text chat
• Desktop sharing and video conferencing
• VoIP (PBX server)
• File creation, storage, sharing and retention

The beta version of this integrated disk image is available on the mesh now. As the last bugs are worked out, it will be shared to support regional emergency communication teams across OC and all over North America.

KM6SLF

This little FitPC4 I’ve put together is a pretty impressive device. It sports a quad core processor, 16 GB of DDR3 RAM, and a Kingston DC450R 3.84TB SSD. It’s passively cooled and accepts a broad input voltage (10-15v, easily powered from a battery or car cigarette lighter) and runs on no more than 25 Watts. It has dual Ethernet ports, WiFi, and plenty of USB, display and other IO available.

I have this one set up to provide non-Internet dependent maps, forward and reverse address look up for all of North America, and (soon) near-instant route planning for Southern California. Special thanks to Sherri @ Kingston for the support – Serving map tiles, geolocation data and routing information takes a LOT of storage, but the Kingston DC450R 3.84TB drive (designed for datacenter use) is making short work of it, and enabling a broader area to be covered than I had initially planned on such a small device.

KM6SLF

The Net check-in form is now located in the Resources section. The newly-created Tri-Cities RACES Training Center link can be found in the Resources section, also. Members can use that resource to find the FEMA Training that we need to stay current on. New interactive content can be developed as needed.