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Myself, I'm a newb radio technician, so I know where you're coming from.

What you want is a "Yagi" antenna. Very directional and therefore, longer range.

That's one of the three good options.

The others are a parabolic dish (made of wire mesh or kitchen foil over a frame made of wood, stouter wire, or whatever, fed with a bipole, biquad, or whatever) or a SBF (like this, but bigger to suit the wavelength of your 4g service).

The actual news item got someone else to host the images, so it has a decent chance of surviving /. But maybe that was the point of all those decoy links.

The biography of Paul Marsh is currently Slashdotted.

Group photo of the 1st HAMS to do Moon Bounce - The dish used came off British Telecom's "Post Office" tower in London. If you wish to see it yourself then come along to FRARS's HAMFEST on Sunday 8th August 2004. More moonbounce photos here.

FRARS still has some of the leading experts in communications - including M0EYT / Paul J. Marsh who is currently just out in the middle of a field working 10Ghz.... Paul's probably on IRC as well right now so I will see what I can do to highlight this discussion to him in a minute.

Group photo of the 1st HAMS to do Moon Bounce - The dish used came off British Telecom's "Post Office" tower in London. If you wish to see it yourself then come along to FRARS's HAMFEST on Sunday 8th August 2004. More moonbounce photos here.

FRARS still has some of the leading experts in communications - including M0EYT / Paul J. Marsh who is currently just out in the middle of a field working 10Ghz.... Paul's probably on IRC as well right now so I will see what I can do to highlight this discussion to him in a minute.

Group photo of the 1st HAMS to do Moon Bounce - The dish used came off British Telecom's "Post Office" tower in London. If you wish to see it yourself then come along to FRARS's HAMFEST on Sunday 8th August 2004. More moonbounce photos here.

FRARS still has some of the leading experts in communications - including M0EYT / Paul J. Marsh who is currently just out in the middle of a field working 10Ghz.... Paul's probably on IRC as well right now so I will see what I can do to highlight this discussion to him in a minute.

Group photo of the 1st HAMS to do Moon Bounce - The dish used came off British Telecom's "Post Office" tower in London. If you wish to see it yourself then come along to FRARS's HAMFEST on Sunday 8th August 2004. More moonbounce photos here.

FRARS still has some of the leading experts in communications - including M0EYT / Paul J. Marsh who is currently just out in the middle of a field working 10Ghz.... Paul's probably on IRC as well right now so I will see what I can do to highlight this discussion to him in a minute.

• FM sound quality with wide AM reach with digital reception quality
• Digital tuning support station text
• Supports multiple channels with digital audio/text/other services
• Can use existing transmitters

Useful links:

• Digital Radio Modiale organisation's homepage
• Open Source DRM software
• DRMRX - Commercial DRM software
• FRARS (where both myself and MOEYT are members)
• BBC: Research Department (Doing work on testing DRM)
• BBC Research Department papers (includes DRM papers
• MOEYT/Paul Marsh's homepage (lots of info on satcom and DRM info soon...)
• Introduction to the GNU software radio project with various links

• FM sound quality with wide AM reach with digital reception quality
• Digital tuning support station text
• Supports multiple channels with digital audio/text/other services
• Can use existing transmitters

Useful links:

• Digital Radio Modiale organisation's homepage
• Open Source DRM software
• DRMRX - Commercial DRM software
• FRARS (where both myself and MOEYT are members)
• BBC: Research Department (Doing work on testing DRM)
• BBC Research Department papers (includes DRM papers
• MOEYT/Paul Marsh's homepage (lots of info on satcom and DRM info soon...)
• Introduction to the GNU software radio project with various links

The frars talk I attended was given by M0EYT and covered the future of long range digital broadcasts using Digital Radio Modiale. The BBC research labs and many others are involved with DRM research. Just about to load up M0EYT's talk (which unfortunately isn't publically available - sorry!).

Totally agree. I think sending streams of public data over long range radio would help, e.g. by making using GNU software radio project. Just hunting down some links from a very good talk on the forth coming long wave digital radio that I attended at FRARS.

Totally agree. I think sending streams of public data over long range radio would help, e.g. by making using GNU software radio project. Just hunting down some links from a very good talk on the forth coming long wave digital radio that I attended at FRARS.

Some useful technical information / photos in relation to extending WLAN links can be found on the FRARS WLAN website here.

Some guy has done that in the UK, not sure they are DirectTV but they look similar.

Modified Dish

14Km Link

Just been looking around their site, some pretty smart wlan stuff there.

Some guy has done that in the UK, not sure they are DirectTV but they look similar.

Modified Dish

14Km Link

Just been looking around their site, some pretty smart wlan stuff there.

Wireless (802.11b)...this is a great alternative...my LUG uses it all of the time, it's great because you get real high speeds out of it (over 10 Mb vs. 256k MAX for IR) and it's available almost everywhere...you'ld be supprised how much wireless is in the air.

As for security ... don't read everything you hear ... you're already mobile ... but then again, IR is worse because there is NO built-in security (except maybe the line-of-sight/distance thing)!!!

You can easily find PCMCIA wireless cards for under $50 ... You get fast, easy connectivity, without the whole line-of-sight requirement and you get a great mobile network card that you'll find yourself using more and more as time goes on.

Not to mention that you can get Wicked Distance from 802.11b!!! Yes, this is a special case, but 100 meters is certainly no problem.

While IR is nice and will certainly be used (in other devices) for a long time to come, 802.11b should be your choice for mobile networking. It's worth noting that many companies are already including built-in 802.11b in their notebooks (either standard or as an option).

We've been doing some experiments at our local HAM club - check out: FRARS Homepage and for wlan stuff: FRARS wlan pages

We've been doing some experiments at our local HAM club - check out: FRARS Homepage and for wlan stuff: FRARS wlan pages