The Network Expands

[kevin_standlee]

Lisa decided that I needed a connection to our home network in the bedroom, so she went to work today on creating it.



This is the rack panel located in a closet off Lisa's "office" (the secondary bedroom). We bought this small rack from Weird Stuff Warehouse (R.I.P.) for only $25 shortly after we bought the house. The network patch panel we got from an electronics store in Reno that is also no longer among the living. You can see various conduits taking lines down below the house for distribution. There's plenty of room remaining, and someday she intends to run lines upstairs as well once we're ready to make the upstairs fully habitable (including heating and air conditioning).

This morning, Lisa went down under the house through the hatch in the kitchen and located a spot where she could safely drill through the baseboard into the bedroom. After drilling the hole, she had me help her feed cat-6 wire down the hole while she pulled it over to the wiring closet, up a newly-installed conduit, and into the patch panel.



Lisa then wired in a new RJ-45 port below the power outlets that sit beside the bed. There was initially some difficulty getting it to work, which she eventually traced to one of the ports on the patch panel being bad. She moved the wires to a different port and everything worked.

The yellow spot is a plastic bag covering a register for the house's furnace system, which has no ducts. We keep the registers wrapped to prevent them from leaking air out of the house and reduce the number of things that might crawl through them from under the house.

I eventually will probably use one of the older computers to run an internet radio in the bedroom. We get nearly no radio reception out here in Fernley, and what stations we do receive are not the ones to which we want to listen.

Comments

[delosharriman]

Very neat work! The telephone wiring here is on the fritz, but I am not going to undertake to deal with it, because we had radiant-barrier insulation laid (like a deck over the ceiling joists) in what passes for an attic (more of a crawl space), which is where the wiring runs.

[scott_sanford]

I don't think I'd ever thought about your commercial AM/FM reception there.

That does remind me of something though. On the phone the other day Lisa did mention that she wasn't talking on ham radio much these days, which disappointed me. On the 2m band you have inconvenient mountains between you and Reno, but it seemed to me she might get decent reception on HF. She did say that she's not equipped to use most modern tone-keyed repeaters; do you think she needs another radio?

The question got me poking the internet and I discovered there's a repeater literally around the block from you, possibly mounted on the microwave mast next to the Masonic lodge. It seems frustrating that a ham as experienced as Lisa couldn't work a repeater that she could call by stepping out on the porch and yelling.

[garyomaha]

Lisa does nice work! All that's missing (IMHO) is a bank of flashing lights. (Doesn't really matter if the lights *mean* anything -- though that would be a bonus.)

[kevin_standlee]

Ask and you shall receive, although admittedly it's not a whole lot of lights because there's not a huge amount of network activity while I'm taking this picture. Click through to watch the lights flash.

[garyomaha]

One more thing. In addition to an Internet Radio, we also have one "permanent" Internet station on our home audio system, using a Raspberry Pi computer that M programmed just for the task. We listen enough to this one station that it deserved its own "button" on our system. (We have a bazillion OTA stations around here, with very few of interest to us.)