In Italy, ham radio enthusiast founded an organization called ARI (Associazione Radioamatori Italiani – italian radioamateur organization) that is recognized by the Italian Government.
When i moved to Brescia to attend the Electronic Engineering course, I quickly found out that the ARI had a branch near my university.
It turned out that some friends of mine are members of this branch, and they invited me to a speech that had one of them as a speaker.
The speech shared information about a high-mountain site that the ARI had bought back in 2012, but that received little-to-no interest from the ARI members, except for a very small group of people.
This is a photo of the site. As you can see, some maintenance is needed, especially on the ground with grass and the trees that are growing and need to be cut.
The site is completely off-grid, so it needs solar power to work. On the right side of the picture you can see the structure holding two big solar panel that provide the necessary power to the batteries.
There is a 7-meter mast on which the antennas and some independent systems are mounted.
Site functionality:
- Diamond X-30 for general RX
- Two antennas for a firefighters’ repeater
- 24 GHz and 10 GHz beacon (white boxes)
- 432 MHz beacon made from a repurposed weather radiosonde, powered by it’s own solar panel
- The dish for the Wi-Fi link pointed at an ARI member’s house
I want to put a Meshtastic repeater up there but I need to conduct some tests first. If all goes well, you will see another box & solar panel appear on the mast!
The inside
The structure is made up by 3 rooms: one room for all the radio equipment and computer, another for the electrical, and a small closet to house the tools that’s not featured in the photos below.
The system is managed remotely thanks to a Raspberry Pi and the Wi-Fi link.
An Access Point has been installed on-site allowing one to connect to the Internet with a mobile phone or a computer. In this site, cellular connection is absent.
If for some reason the Wi-Fi link or the Raspberry would stop working, there is a backup connection that works over Packet-Radio, so it’s independent from everything else and just needs the power from the batteries.
This is the ICOM-IC2 used for the backup communication over Packet Radio.
The location of this site (45.600124, 10.330965) allows for a really good reception and it’s fun making contacts here.
