From: Abdul Hameed Sherzad
Date: November 21, 2009 4:21:30 AM EST
Subject: A New connection

Hi everyone,

Now at the top of a water tank almost 4 kilometers from the public health hospital tower [where there is a cluster of FabFi antennas].

We just set up a new connection for Hafiz successfully.

[...]

So Hafiz’s uplink reflector is that big antenna which will probably give signals to me and Rahmat because Hafiz’s house is on our direction. If i can get signals from Hafiz’s uplink, i’ll set up my uplink ( which is obviously redundant then) for Zahin, who wants a connection too.

It took us only 3 hours. pretty easy, huh.

Thanks Keith for your help on skype. That was a great help.

we learn new things as we work on more connections.

thanks,

–
~Hameed

Everett dog is ready to go and impatiently awaits the humans. We assemble one FabFi antenna at the base of Mt. Wachussetts and Jonathan Ward straps it to his back. Jon and Kerry Lynn set off for the summit. Keith Berkoben and I drive to the first test site 6km from the summit but a ridge occludes the view of the mountain. We drive on to the Sterling Airport, a small airfield with a great, clear view of the Mt. Wachussetts. We assemble the second FabFi antenna and point by eye. By phone we give a bearing to the summit team and they point their antenna by compass. It was almost too easy, just like that both routers were talking to each other. We continue to make measurements after the sun set until the summit team’s battery runs out.

Technical details will be available at the FabFi blog sometime this week.

Full res photos available at (beta) Thalia site: http://fab.thalia.mit.edu/?type=album&id=d1c9624a-c7fe-11de-8bd4-3597f7dac090 (someone please let me know how this works for you!)

Hi Everyone,

I hope you are all doing good.

Finally we were able to figure out the problem in Sayad’s connection- the ‘Transmission Power’ was 19 where as no other router in our network had any number in that part. ( I checked a few other routers for confirmation before I removed the 19 from those two routers- Sayad). When I brought the above mentioned change, then the two routers started to talk to each other. Now Sayad is up. His internet connection is working now. Another person ( close by) is also connected to Sayad’s router by a cable.

They were so happy ( felt screaming and jumping) when I screamed ‘Google’ at the top of a roof on a balcony.

We are going to start working on another connection after we get two routers from the person who wants to have connection from the Lab. ( Zahin, our basketball friend). That will be in three days.

Thanks,

Hameed (and Rahmat)

That’s a lot of FabFi.

Shembot - #3 is you. Yep, the triple nickel is now high speeeeed.

I’m sitting on a concrete ledge about 4 stories high in the shade of the water tower looking out through a remarkably clear day across Jalalabad. And I’m writing this post from waaay up here, my connection via a local meshed node through various hops which find their way (automagically) to the FabFi1 long haul connection out through the GATR which beams my message into orbit and back and finally finally to a server at MIT in Cambridge MA. It’s so very cool.

What’s cooler is what’s happening around me. The water tower is super crowded with people and even more FabFi. It’s a party! Our goals for today are to replace and upgrade every existing FabFi connection and add two more ~3.5km each. Right now it’s a mess of people in salwar kameez’s schooching past each other on the narrow ledge carrying router boxes, reflectors, rope, cables, meters, and so on in every direction. Every now and then there’s a shout followed up something getting thrown UP to the top of the tower, or slightly comical attempts to convey what needs to be fetched from below.

We’ve just finished with marching orders, people are breaking up in to groups and readying to travel all over the city. Nearly all the Afghans are on the phone with their friends who want to come up the tower and help so they can learn to make and install a connection for themselves too. Today they will learn the install part, tomorrow a workshop at the new FabLab in the sharwali to make reflectors and program routers.

After tomorrow there will be so many Afghan-made, made-in-Afghanistan FabFi’s deployed throughout the city (and surburbs) that FabFi in Jalalabad has certainly turned the corner and is here to stay - fragile still but established.

from Keith Berkoben
to Said Jalal, Amy Sun , Carl Scheffler , Smári McCarthy , Kerry L, Jesse K
date Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 5:23 PM
subject Fabfi 2 lives!

This email is sent from the watertower in Jalalbad. Said Jalal, Hedayat and Talwar worked hard all day to make it happen! 3800m… More work to do tomorrow…

Hello Ms. Amy,

It’s been more than two months that we use internet from Fab Lab. It is really fast. Sometimes, I brag about my internet speed to my friends whose internet speed is slower than ours. So thank you very much. It’s been a great help.

Thanks,

Hameed

Early in the morning of 8/31 a giant thunderstorm rolled in and dumped a stunning amount of water on us. High winds blew open my window which woke me up briefly enough to see the absolute solid wall of water as if Shem’s house had been moved under a waterfall. Lightning lit up the sky with such frequency it was nearly daylight.

The next morning Logan asked if it had rained the previous night. The concrete houses are sound insulated enough that on the first floor I would have slept through the storm too had my window not blown open. The front yard didn’t look too different but once the front gates were opened we could see that Jalalabad had been flooded.

All over Jalalabad culverts overflowed, low areas became rushing rivers, mud walls melted, and houses were damaged or destroyed. The biggest casualty was Saracha Bridge, about 1 km east of FOB Fenty towards Torkham. Tim and I went out to see the bridge a day later and found two and three story tall bridge footings washed down river and most of the bridge completely gone. The river looks innocent and small, only the near opaque turbidity gives away upstream mischief. Brick archways and stone footings are stranded on dry rock in what now looks like a dry river bed.

The initial ANSO report implied some damage that would be fixed within a day, which in Afghanistan usually might mean a week or so. I couldn’t remember a significant bridge to the east of the customs house because the road bed is wide and the approach to the bridge is long and gentle. We were unprepared for what we saw and initially I didn’t even realize that the enormous expanse had a bridge suitable for heavy truck traffic spanning it only a day before.

There were trucks everywhere, pulled on to the side of the road on both sides of the bridge. Some tried to use smaller roads to the north or south as bypasses but upstream and downstream bridges were questionable themselves. The bypasses were not necessarily a great choice because the heavy trucks made big muddy ruts in the small dirt roads. So most cars and trucks opted to try their luck simply driving through the river after the water level went down.

Several bulldozers had arrived and were making ramps down and up the banks to make it easier for the vehicles to get down to the stream bed. While we watched, about 2 in 3 cars or trucks made it through ok, sometimes with a little help from the masses of Afghans who had collected to watch and see if anything exciting might happen. A handful of jingle trucks seemed to be pretty stuck.

During the storm Keith logged in to the FabFi’s and we were thrilled to see the routers were up. Sometime the next morning, he tried again and FabFi1 was down. So he went up to the roof and found that the plastic bag taped around the router had been ravaged and filled with water and the router was completely drowned in the water. He poked a hole in the bag and drained the water; we assumed that we’d lost the router. A while later after hours drying in the hot sun, he plugged in the router just to see what would happen… and FabFi1 was back up!

The southern face of the tower is cluttered with FabFi

Day 2 on the ground warranted a visit to the tower where we found several more FabFi had cropped up. It’s getting sufficiently crowded that we need to consider semi-omni-directional antennae and multiple downstream connections on each reflector on the tower.

FF2.0 hardware upgrade includes a snazzy acrylic box to weatherproof the router.

The sun set halfway through our upgrades. FF2.0 software upgrade includes full meshing and allows multiple uplinks in the mesh.

The technical details are at fabfiblog.fabfolk.com; the summary is that with FF2.0 meshing update, the antennae no longer need to work as dedicated pairs. We can simply install 360-degrees of FabFi on the tower and allow those FF to mesh with each other. A wider beam (ie, more open parabola) would allow us to use fewer reflectors - technically reducing the linkable distance, but since Jbad is only about 5km wide in total we’re not pushing our abilities.

With Abu's (Ghana) help, Talwar cut out this large FF reflector by himself on the shopbot in Pune. Said Jalal and Hedayat staple on the window screen in Jalalabad. This will be the new north side large FF.

Logan and a large FF on the north face of the tower. Logan and Said Jalal managed to find a rickshaw driver who drives like Baba Tim to take them to the market to fetch some rope. The large reflectors don't fit up the stairwell and are hauled hand-over-hand via rope up the side of the tower.

The elements are not kind to the equipment, but there's still green lights across the board.

This reflector was installed in May 2009. When I touched the plastic after taking this photo, the plastic crumbled and fell away in tiny pieces which were immediately carried away by the wind.

Tim’s son Logan is super eager to help, which is fortunate because we’re all kind of lazy (or lazy and sick, in the case of Smari and Carl). Logan is pretty tall by my standards, probably 6′1″, but that makes him the second or third shortest of the crew on this trip. Weird but true.

Logan the Nuristani taking his load of FabFi to market.

As far as I can tell, Logan will carry anything from place to place whether it’s antennae, UPSes (those things are heavy!), or large boxes precariously overflowing and somewhat taped “closed”. Maybe varsity crew has his brain pre-conditioned for this kind of thing.

Smari and Nels upgrade the downlink at the hospital administration building.

Keith is trapped by FabFi's on the southeast corner of the tower.

Note Tupperware enclosure for router…