RE: march 21 topics

[Garrett Goebel]

Title: RE: march 21 topics

From: Garrett Goebel [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> From: David Nicol [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> >
> > Anyone want to work towards the direction of setting up a
> > formal public wireless net such as exist in London and
> > Portland?  That's really more a LUG kind of issue rather
> > than a PM one;
>
> www.sputnik.com
>
[...]
> I don't mind being a node on such a network... I could even be
> convinced to put up the $60-75 bucks for a Lucent/Agere ORINOCO
> PCI 11MBPS WIRELESS ADAPTER 848463055 adapter.

Hmm... sputnik doesn't support the various chips which the wavelan variety of adapters uses. It looks like each node would need either a:

 
  Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA 802.11b adapter ~$80
  Linksys WDT11 PCMCIA-to-PCI adapter  ~$40
or
  D-LINK DWL-650 PCMCIA 802.11b adapter ~$80
  D-LINK ??? PCMCIA-to-PCI adapter      ~$??

Which a little more expensive than I'd like. But then the price for the wavelan adapter I quoted didn't include the pcmcia-to-pci adapter either. So the costs are similar. Maybe we could get a discount buying a 10 count package or something? Guess it depends on how many people'd be interested in setting up nodes. It might pay to join up with the local linux users group.

There is a hardware modification to connect an external antenna to the D-LINK adapter. I haven't found anything similar for the LinkSys. http://www.tux.org/~bball/antenna/. Another design for an antenna can be found at: http://users.bigpond.net.au/jhecker/helical.html

I wonder if I could convince my employer to let me setup such a box and mount an antenna on top of our tallest building(s)? It would certainly be a nice investment in return for giving our employees local and eventually/potentially nationwide roaming service.