How it works
Ever wonder how Mt Hamilton Internet service gets the Internet to you? Most likely not, but here it is anyway!
It starts for us at the Knight Rider building downtown San Jose. It is about 7.7 miles line of sight from my house in the middle of the cluster of building downtown.
The large round antenna on the left point to San Jose and brings in the INTERNET. The smaller round antenna to its right points to Santa Clara and is a backup should the primary go off for any reason. On the back of the house there are 4 antennas, the top is a vertical serving several clients around me. the next one down is a high power sector which serves most of the traffic. The next one down is sideways in this picture, but serves a number clients east of me including a solar powered repeater a couple ridges over.
Above is the receiver (the Ceragon) The big black cable comes from the antenna on roof. The double orange cable is a fiber optic cable from the receiver to the router.
Below the receiver is the Netequalizer. This gets its input from the Router and sends them on to you. This is the box that controls bandwidth and insures that everyone gets their fair share of the internet.
Now, some people have asked me what happens during a power outage. All of the above equipment and all of my radios run from a large UPS power supply shown below. When the power goes out, the UPS keeps everything up. After the power is out for 30 to 45 seconds, the generator auto starts. The generator has enough diesel fuel to last for over a week. So far in 30 years I only had power out for that amount of time once and had to bring up 15 gal more fuel before the power was restored.
As the radios operate on the 5.8GHz band they must have clear line of site to work. To meet this requirement we currently have 6 repeater sites located in Clayton Valley and Mt Hamilton. Most of the relay sites also have a smaller UPS supply that keeps the power on them for a few hours of outage. I will work to get more pictures of some of the repeaters.