The High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN), a University of California San Diego partnership project led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics in collaboration with the San Diego Supercomputer Center, supports internet-data applications in the research, education, and public safety realms with a strong emphasis on wide-area accessibility, extending to remote areas. The project was initially funded by the National Science Foundation, but has become self sufficient since.

HPWREN functions as a collaborative, internet-connected cyberinfrastructure. Since the beginning of this millennium, the project has been supporting what is now a high-bandwidth wireless backbone and access data network in San Diego, Riverside, and Imperial counties in areas that are typically not well-served by other technologies to reach the Internet. This includes backbone locations, often sited on mountain tops or in the desert, in many cases connecting hard-to-reach areas in the remote Southern California back country.

Recent Images

Monument Peak, in the Laguna Mountains range, currently hosts a test suite of newest generation cameras, to be evaluated for future HPWREN deployment. Jim Davidson designed and implemented this testbed. Some interesting cameras include 33 megapixel chips, an in-camera collation to a combined 180 degree field of view and/or good night performance. The good night performance is important as our next generation cameras will likely differ from our current cameras in that they will not have dual-barrel color and monochrome sensors pointing into the same direction. Images from those cameras on our current web page under All Specialized FFoV.

HPWREN's Whale Mountain Relay, a solar-powered relay site, burned over during the Rancho3 fire in Oct 2025. We finalized the rebuild in May of 2026. The relay services Calfire station 87 (Witch Creek) via a wireless link to North Peak. Also in this case, Jim Davidson had the lead to make this happen. We finalized the rebuild in May of 2026.

Blood Moon Over Sky Oaks

7 March 2026

In the pre-dawn hours of March 3, 2026, the sky above San Diego County's Palomar Mountain region put on a rare celestial performance: the last total lunar eclipse visible from North America until New Year's Eve 2028. At San Diego State University's (SDSU) Sky Oaks Ranch Ecological Reserve - a dark-sky site nestled in the Cleveland National Forest far from city lights - a network of scientific cameras documented every phase of the eclipse from dusk to dawn. The resulting time-lapse record vividly illustrates what happens to a moonlit landscape when the Moon is swallowed by Earth's shadow - and what is revealed when that shadow falls.

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