Here are the meeting notes from the October TCWUG meeting. Apologies for
being extremely late. The September meeting notes will follow soon.


October 14th 2003


Introductions


The Loring Park project update.

                Ben Nelson and Neal Krasnoff worked very hard getting
                the equipment inventoried and assembling mounts for the
                antennas. Ben showed off pictures of the sturdy antenna
                mount and we now have a list of available equipment for
                the project. Much of it has been bought by Neal
                Krasnoff, so many thanks to him. For the backbone
                between the Internet connection and the MCTC site we are
                planning on using a dish antenna and then at the MCTC
                site using a couple 8.5dBi panels to cover the park.
                Neal has one panel for now and additional panel antennas
                can be easily purchased and added on as needed for
                better park coverage. Ben Nelson is going to follow up
                with the MCTC maintainance people to get us access to
                the roof and power and such for the equipment. We also
                need to look at the grounding issues for the antennas
                and equipment.
                
                
        
Ben Kochie talked about his project with the University of Minnesota. He
is working on getting wireless access at a building in the St Paul
campus. This could eventually be used for a backbone.


Andrew Zimmer invested much time and effort into a spiffy newsletter.
The newsletter talks about basic wireless topics such as WEP and some of
the latest wireless events. Andrew has also developed some pamplets that
could be distributed at coffee shops or doorsteps of people who have
unsecured wireless access points. These pamplets also talk about how to
set up an access point and why it is important to secure them.


If anyone would like to contribute any articles such as a howto page or
if anyone has any distribution ideas we would like to hear them.


We talked about the tcwug website and the need for it to be updated. The
individuals who are in charge of the site have not been attending for
some time and we are looking for someone to add a flexible content
management system to the site to make it more dynamic.


The TCWUG has been in the news lately. KSTP did a short story that
supposedly aired about the loring park project. It was in the form of a
survey of park-goers asking if they would like or use wireless.


There was also an article in Skypoint News about wireless access in the
Minneapolis Park Systems.


An additional way to get the word out about the TCWUG is through
business cards. We have been talking about getting personalized and
non-personalized cards to hand out to the public to spread the word.
Vistaprint was mentioned as an online producer of business cards and
they have designs and a limited number of free business cards online.



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