BBHN vs AREDN Firmware Discussion

Mar 25, 2015 - If you are just starting out with mesh experimenting and go looking for firmware, the first thing you will discover is that there are now two different ham mesh projects. One is named BBHN the other AREDN. Here is what I have been able to determine by poking around. I have sent this same info by email to several users so it may be old news to some, but in order to get everyone up to speed here it goes again..

In regards BBHN vs AREDN, there is a bit of controversy right now. At the moment they are exactly the same firmware with the exception of the SSID that is set. A short summary of the situation is that there are two main groups working on the Ham mesh project. One is in Texas around Austin, the other in CA in the San Diego area. The Austin group did the original mesh modifications to OpenWRT, the base OS, using the WRT54 platform. Many continue to use the Linksys routers today. That initial project was called HSMM. The San Diego team developed the later versions of the firmware that were renamed BBHN, and started supporting the more capable Ubiquiti radios. Most recently the SD guys wanted to drop support for WRT altogether. They site the vast superiority of the Ubiquiti gear and the fact that the firmware features they want to add in the future won't fit in the WRT's limited memory. This lack of WRT support was a strong point of disagreement between the two groups and a "divorce" resulted. This happened in the last month or so. The average users were basically in the dark during the "breakup";

posts on the forums were censored and redacted, firmware files mysteriously disappeared, and web site URL's changed. I attended the Yuma Hamfest were Andre K6AH from the SD group gave two mesh presentations. He hinted then there was trouble brewing with Austin, but it took a few private email exchanges with a informed third party to find out what was really going on. The guys in SD just renamed the current firmware (v3.0.1) to AREDN v3.0.2, put in some "branding" and changed the SSID to AREDN. That means if it is not changed back to "BroadbandHamnet" the new AREDN nodes won't talk to BBHN nodes. If you already have many BBHN nodes deployed you would have to change all the SSID's to AREDN to switch over. If you are starting from scratch and setting up an isolated network it doesn't matter which you choose. I stayed with BBHN because I have about 15 nodes including demo WRT's and did not want to change them all. I felt it was a bit mean spirited of the SD guys to change the SSID in the first place, knowing the problems it would cause. The Austin guys re-released the same version (v3.0.2) of the code by taking out the AREDN branding and now call it BBHN v3.1. All very confusing to a new player.

The bottom line here is that we are currently using BBHN firmware with "BroadbandHamnet" as the SSID and if you want to connect to our Usery nodes either use the BBHN firmware, or change the SSID in the AREDN firmware on the setup page. The SSID has to be set exactly right with the correct placement of upper and lower case characters in order to connect.

There is a chance that these two groups may resolve their differences. I believe they are both working/trying hard to promote mesh networking in the Amateur community and both have valid reasons for their actions. It just too bad that there will end up being a lot of duplication of effort and time wasted that could be better spent. Such as supporting additional radio platforms.

addendum: 10/16/19 We have since switched to AREDN FW for the last few years, but BBHN is still around.