Some local HAM radio guys and I are working on setting up gateways in Calgary, Alberta. We’ve got one on top of a school with a really big col-linear outdoor antenna that covers a lot of the city, but we’d like to expand even farther.
There are mountains with HAM equipment up on them near our city. Would it be reasonable to put gateways up there? They should have a range of 100’s of km LOS.
Does anyone have examples of this being done before?
Does a node at 127,000 feet about 100km away ground distance count?
That’s 107km according to Pythagorus - and the receiver was using a mag mount whip aerial so we’d have probably heard the node for longer if we’d had a proper aerial at the base station.
So, subject to the curvature of the earth, you should get some pretty good coverage. But it may well be you still need to in-fill the dead patches in the city.
Simplest thing to do is give it a try.
There are plus points and maybe bad points with locating gateways on mountains.
For sure in a sparsely populated area you could indeed provide coverage over a very wide area, possibly an area of 100km square. Truely an asset for remote communities.
But next to a city ? What could happen ?
Well your mountain top Gateway would have very good coverage for a nearby city and it could well become the goto Gateway for the entire city. Why would a node want to talk to an established ground based Gateway that is 2km way with semi-weak signals when its getting very strong signals from the Gateway on the nearby mountain top?
In addition, one of the main reasons for restricting power outputs for nodes and Gateways is to restrict coverage to relativly short distances so that small adjacent areas can share a limited range of frequencies without undue interferance.