Modernizing WiFi at Pinnacle Pines Country Club: A Project Introduction
Modernizing WiFi at Pinnacle Pines Country Club: A Project Introduction
An Engineer’s Perspective
I’ll be honest — I don’t play golf. Well, I play golf, but not seriously enough to belong to a country club. So when my neighborhood country club asked me to help redesign their wireless network, it got my attention in a way a typical commercial project might not.
What caught my eye wasn’t the golf. It was the challenge.
This is a private, membership-driven course sitting above 7,500 feet elevation with virtually no cellular coverage — making Wi-Fi Calling a genuine safety necessity, not just a convenience. The course is built around dramatic red rock spires and pinnacles that are stunning to look at and an absolute nightmare to push RF through. Hilly terrain bordered by Ponderosa Pine, Douglas Fir, and Gambel Oak makes predictive modeling only a starting point.
Add a full indoor WiFi 7 upgrade plus a phased outdoor buildout across fairways, parking areas, and outbuildings — some connected by existing Ubiquiti 60GHz point-to-point links — and you have a project with real technical teeth. This is the kind of work I got into wireless engineering for.
A Technology Sandbox
This project puts a serious breadth of technology into play:
- WiFi 7 (802.11be) with Ubiquiti U7 Pro access points
- 6 GHz band operation in a challenging real-world RF environment
- WPA3 enterprise and personal security profiles
- Outdoor Mesh for areas where cabling isn’t practical
- 60GHz Point-to-Point — existing Ubiquiti infrastructure serving remote locations
- WLANpi R4 — permanent remote probe feeding live metrics to our cloud Grafana dashboard
- AirMagnet Survey Pro with GPS across a large outdoor campus
- NetAlly AirCheck G3 — first field comparison against the G2, specifically for 6GHz measurement
That last point deserves a callout. Julio at NetAlly was instrumental in getting the AirCheck G3 into our hands for this project. Without the ability to actually measure 6GHz in the field, you’re designing blind. More on the G3 vs G2 comparison in a future post.
This project is also the first live deployment on my new remote monitoring platform — a cloud-based stack running Prometheus and Grafana. You can follow the live network metrics directly from this site.
It Takes a Team
My role here is network designer — but twenty-plus years in this industry has made one thing clear: the network designer is just one piece of a successful deployment. It doesn’t take a village, but it sure takes a team.
Here’s a brief introduction to the people making this happen, because of privacy concerns, listed by title only. We’ll hear more from each of them as the project progresses:
Project Chair – The driving force behind this project. He identified the need, championed it through the approval process, and has kept things moving at every stage.
General Manager – Key stakeholder defining what the network needs to deliver — from reliable indoor coverage to connectivity on the course during events.
Director of Agronomy – Responsible for the existing outdoor infrastructure, including the 60GHz PtP links serving remote locations. Jason has the clearest picture of what Phase III will require and brings hard-won operational knowledge of the existing gear. Ask him how to bring a bank of 60GHz radios back online in the correct sequence after a full shutdown — he’ll walk you through it without hesitation. That kind of knowledge is invaluable, and we’ll be capturing it in future posts.
Maintenance Manager – Joey’s background in structured cabling has proven indispensable. He’s running new cable to AP locations indoors and out, and secured the fabrication contract for a new 15-foot steel light pole to support an outdoor mesh AP and WiFi cameras in the parking area. Good cabling is the foundation everything else sits on.
IT Contractor Performed the March 2026 infrastructure upgrade — controller migration, switch and firewall upgrades, and initial WiFi 7 AP adoptions — setting the stage for everything that follows.
The Technical Committee Provides budget oversight and project approval. Their support has been essential in moving this from concept to execution.
Survey Engineer – Helped conduct the initial site surveys that established our baseline RF picture. Good survey data is where every good design starts.
NetAlly – Made sure we had the right tool for 6GHz measurement. That matters more than it might sound.
More contributors will be introduced as the project grows.
The Project Structure
Phase I — Indoor WiFi 7 Upgrade Complete redesign and replacement of indoor APs with Ubiquiti U7 Pro. Passive site survey, placement design, installation, and post-installation validation are all complete or underway.
Phase II — Close-in Outdoor WiFi PtP link to the snack shop, putting area coverage, exterior clubhouse mounting, and the new parking area light pole. Underway.
Phase III — Outer Fairways The most complex phase — back holes and outer fairways using PtP, outdoor mesh, and Starlink backhaul. The cellular dead zone here makes this a safety infrastructure project as much as a WiFi upgrade. In planning.
Live network metrics, survey results, design decisions, and lessons learned will all be documented here as this project unfolds — whether you’re a seasoned wireless engineer or someone who just inherited a network, there’s something here for you.
— Rick Murphy, CWNE #10