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Aussies Put Old Pay-TV Dishes To Use -- As A LAN
Insane Hardware writes: "If you thought the olympic show the Aussie's put on was pretty tops, then this will blow your socks off. Insane Hardware sends in word about a group of people in the country's capital, Canberra (just south of Sydney), who are setting up a wireless air network for game play amoungst many other things (pr0n trading???). So how are these guys doing it and doing it cheaply? Well they are using satellite dishes from an old defunct Pay-TV system Australia had some years back called Galaxy, and are using some standard old full-length WaveLAN ISA cards which operate in the 2.4GHz range to hook up to these ol dishes. " (More below.)
Mr. Hardware continues: "Although not the best speeds, approximately 2Mbps with a 2.2ms round trip latency isn't too shabby when you consider the cost and implementation of this. Hell, you can even learn how to make a reciever dish at this site! So how is it powered? Linux of course! Check out www.air.net.au for more info."
Check out the mailing list archives to see how much progress they've made, too -- perhaps some friendly (and entrepreneurial) Slashdot reader can hook a few Canberrans up with wireless cards for cheaper than they can get them down there?
Yer I saw that. The article is infact on Air.net.au. It has some excellent info on it. Im interested in trying something like this, however I am unsure about the FFC rules and regulations for 2.4GHz operation. Isn't that "free" man's territory?
John
John
How do you pronounce XXXX?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
four-ecks
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Considering that you can buy Melbourne Bitter in Victoria as well, I doubt that this is true. They might have started bringing it to Sydney to combat Tooheys "Sydney Bitter" (which was a nice beer, but they kept changing the recipe until it ended up tasting of sump-oil).
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
If Canberra is too cold for you, go stand in front of one of these 2.4GHz dishes :)
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
Actually, it looks like they are just using the antennas from the defunct TV service, not the satelites.
In fact, if you read their site, they are using home-made and other types of antennas as well.
I live in Sydney, and on the way back from a recent skiing trip we passed through Canberra. It takes all of 5 mins to drive from one end to the other. Canberra is like a country town, and since the project is specified at "North Canberra" I'm wondering why they didn't use normal cables ;)
I can see why /. called it a "LAN" rather than "WAN" though...
Still, I can't quite see myself drinking Crownies out of a blue can..
Who wants to try this in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area? I'm 23 stories up and have a good line of sight view to many places around St. Paul.
austad@NO.SPAM.marketwatch.com
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
They are using the canberra plans to make helical antennae and set up a city-wide wireless network.
for free
you dont need to hack into the airport. just unscrew it and plug in an antenna. it's an orinocco card and it has an antenna jack built in.
Ahhh, Cascade Premium.... mmmmm...
Another great one is J.Boags & Sons Premium...
Funnily enough, both are Tasmania... Must be the clean fresh water we have down here!
The Galaxy "satellite" dishes didn't point at a satellite either. They pointed at a local transmission tower
I think you may be confusing the two Galaxy dishes. The genuine satellite service used a solid, offset parabolic dish (so that the feedhorn doesn't obstruct the dish), which was pointed at one of the Aussat satellites (IIRC.) The microwave service used a wire mesh "dish" pointed at a base station. The article refers to "Galaxy TV antennas" which sounds more like the microwave antenna.
Just south of Sydney is.....Wollongong!
I haven't been to the 'gong for a while, but it most definetely is not our nations captial! I thought Canberra was mostly west from Sydney. Where's my map...
Nitpick: *sigh* The only place here in Oz that most people know about is the now cliched "Sydney, Australia". Canberra would be better described as "central NSW, where it's bloody cold and only fat-cat pollie's want to stay" :)
great fun - we used a repeater based wavelan setup to reach a laptop attached to a camera mounted on a cow... http://cowcam.co.uk/
The Government here regards spectrum as its own asset not as a community asset to be regulated for the benefit of all.
They charge BIG dollars for the right to do this kind of thing in "THEIR" spectrum.
It sucks but thats how the system works.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
There was an article at technocrat.net about it, but the search seems to be down so can't find it now, also possibly it was posted on /.?
Nice if someone could set up a group/site/thing to coordinate things a bit more, save running into IP conflicts (quite a few seem to be going for IPV6) if they get linked together (even if only tunneled through the internet) and to get some linking going of cos :).
~ppppppppö
Don't let yourself get caught :)
And with satellite dishes (which transmit directionally), this isn't even too hard to accomplish.
Unless someone is that stupid to point his antenna directly at some feds, they won't receive the signal, and everything is fine.
I guess something like that could even be used as some semisecure, because listening in ("wire"-tapping) is kinda impossible if you're not exactly between the sending and the receiving antenna.
So what about all those irridium sattelites? Or have they burned up already? :)
If not, well, this may be a good "cheap" network in the sky.
Ñ'
I'm in NYC (Manhattan and Brooklyn), and would love to see a free wireless service. I'd be willing to set up base in Brooklyn and maybe in Manhattan. I currently have 4 WebGear cards running at home in my LAN. I have also have CDPD service from Verizon at $40/month. It would be a pipe dream if I can dump them and get higher speed service for no cost...
I have an old Bell Expressvu dish kickin around (with the old hardware before the upgrade to the new satellite) anyone get it working with one of these? How about dishes from other vendors? For some reason I cannot load the link so maybe that info is on thier site?
This could be a good way for people in the country to get higher speed net access. If you can find a near-by friend with high-speed access that is.
Or it could be the classic:
"The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain."
or something like that.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
They are simply using the dishes as 2.4Ghz directional antennas.
Sounds cool, right? Might want to check local regulations for the 2.4Ghz ISM band. You can only have so much gain for so much power... if you try this in the US you might be violating FCC.
Have a look at consume.net for a similar project that's underway in London, the difference being that it's being designed as a bandwidth sharing scheme so that packets from wireless devices can be forwarded to the general Internet using routers attached to ubiquitous wireless basestations.
hahaha well I am sure the CUB really does not give a shit
Link to the Lopht's Guerrilla net mentioned above.
~ppppppppö
Those bloody snakes get everywhere don't they :)
~ppppppppö
While we are firm and juicy, we only turn red when we get too much sun.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
Ha! How about DSL Installs that arn't possible..
I asked Tellus and they basically said:
"The phone lines in that area are so crappy, Its
a wonder that your phone even works."
So I went and got cable. and with 200kbps average
I'm happy. (sometimes up to 300kbps)
Sig? What sig?
Surely they call themselves "Canberries"...
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
As for the dishes, haven't been recently, but I'd guess the old non digital ones are probably being given away at most of the auctions in the country.
*mirroring stuff like DVD decryption software maybe* and of course now with all this censorware and government pressure pr0n is under threat at well, should get mirroring all you can find right now, umm for political purposes of course...
~ppppppppö
Sounds really nice. A good solution for cities. Does it have a gateway to the net at large? If so, when is one coming to New York, and where do I sign up?
Ñ'
I would be thrilled to have wireless access via a system like that but I don't think that this will ever happen.
PejVHF8LRIgynjB0dqjTuH4/8A-Z9#sSQV74sR>S4983w0cSM
(Just thinking out loud...)
/ k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films /
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
In Aussi-land, where it's good weather all the time, you might get away with this. In some countries in europe, which we will not mention by name, it is always raining and as such a hell of a lot less fun playing around with satellite dishes outside.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
If you can make a wireless LAN out of old satellite dishes, then you can surely transmit satellite TV from them also, can't you?
There's an EETimes article about it here. To sum up:
This mostly concerns the battle between HomeRF and 802.11, but does give some good info.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Sorry, I completely disagree with you.
/dev/null
I prefer wireless linux-driven network information over the repetitive mega-cool/atari-handheld stuff.
Gee, Slashdot posting things that are not incredibly interesting for every single reader?
Wah.
The Slashdot guys do a decent job of getting interesting stuff - no filter is perfect.
cat Flame.didntmeanto >
Ok, so some filters are perfect.
"if Joe Q. Schmuck's shoelace has Linux running on a 2" chip"
ummm.. id want THAT posted....
simple.
./vanguard
"I think, therefore I get paid."
Actually.. it isn't directly related to range.
Directional antennas will let you go quite some distance with standard 2.4Ghz stuff, still within regulations. We've set up some 18 and 19 km links using yagi and sectoral antennas. Of course, caluclations were done to make sure we didn't exceed the acceptable limits.
Does anyone remember Radiomodems
1) what happed to them
2) could a radio modem be hocked up to a wireless eithernet device
3) is that what these people have done? Or are they using the dishes as point to point microwave transmiters
Casue I am a little confused here.
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
I did lots of research into this while in college.
I sure wish they set up a short-wave version of this system, so I could continue my research here in the States.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
A use for old satellites, eh? Now if only we had some unused satellites that covered a large percentage of the planet and were planned to be deorbitted just to waste about a billion dollars of technology for fun... ...but we don't have anything like that, right?
------
Let me give you the lowdown
This looks like the Internet connectivity offered in Edmonton, Alberta (and elsewhere) by OA Net, where I work. The Airlink service has been a big seller, largely because DSL installs take so fscking long.
But isn't this kind of thing what gave Fidonet such growing pains? The original Fidonet address spec was two 16 bit integers, but then they had to add zones in front, and they wanted non-dialable client nodes, so points were tacked to the end. Some software never properly supported zones, much less points. (And some TCP/IP software still doesn't support variable length bit masks either.) At least with a full class C per site, they don't have to worry about the "point problem".
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
go to http://www.adelaide.air.net.au for news on our exploits or http://www.tas.air.net for tasmanian info. Melbourne doesnt have a site yet.
I live in Canberra, and while I'm not a part of the geek scene, a lot of my mates are (my copy of mirc is still zipped). If somebody wanted to hassle some of the geeks involved, you can bet you'll find them at #canberra on the local efnet (no, no idea what that is). But what I can tell you is, this is soooooooo far from news it's not funny, this project has been underway for at least a year or two. I used to be interested, but it's just not that great, and afaik most of the people involved are in belconnen and you need to be within x kilometres (about 2.5???) to use it.
Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
If you want a good Australian beer try Cascade Premium, and if you want the beer that we all drink get VB or XXXX. They won't win any competitions but they do the job, and don't completely taste like piss.
Cascade is a good beer, as is anything by Coopers and James Boag. Unfortuantely, VB and XXXX do taste completely like piss.... Toohey's Old & and Toohey's New aren't too bad if you're stuck in Sydney, though.
The main reason VB sells so well in Victoria and XXXX in Queensland is saturation marketing of their home turf.
deus does not exist but if he does
6.25 Australian dollars = 3.53 US dollars Back in kentucky we call that a 12 pack of Old Millwakuee (sp?), and when I was in minnesota for a year they called it pig's eye.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Wait a minute...
Look at Elle McPherson (sp?).
--Ben
--Ben
I've got an old Primestar dish taking up space in my patio (when they "upgraded" me to DirecTV they didn't take it). I wonder if anything can be done like that with old Primestar dishes.
Funnily enough, Australians don't drink fosters.I am Australian and have lived/been to all of the major cities and regional centres and not once have I seen anyone (with the exception of a few tourists) drink fosters.
:)
In fact most of the pubs in Sydney don't have it. Fosters was labeled as piss by Australians a long time ago, so they decided to spend a pretty penny on international marketing to get everyone else to drink it.
If you want a good Australian beer try Cascade Premium, and if you want the beer that we all drink get VB or XXXX. They won't win any competitions but they do the job, and don't completely taste like piss.
In regards to the wireless lan I am interested as too whether our FCC will nab them for it.
Cheers
Now where did I leave the keys to my kangaroo?
yeah- I've used the similar service in Santa Fe, with an antenna mounted on my roof- the article opens up new possibilities of taking it mobile, though- does one need line of sight to the antenna?
um... wouldn't that be _w_an? notmally i wouldn't be that picky, but this is slashdot afterall.
Sitting Walrus Blog
I seem to be seeing lots of questions about the FCC, but in .au it's the SMA (spectrum managment athourity) that handles this (same thing, just different letters). I have no idea on broadcast rules in .au, maybe there are some amatuer radio people here that can explain it better?
Actually the Galaxy antennas in question do include a downconverter/preamplifier which needs to be ripped out before they can be used for transmission.
Not really. In order to get the distances, you need to use fairly highly directional antennas. So the restaurant would have to be very well located, and then you'd have to get your dish in to line of sight of another antenna and carefully line it up.
Kinda like the old joke: Why do they call it XXXX?
Because Queenslanders can't spell Beer. :)
Not that it would matter whether the FCC allowed it or not, since the FCC HAS NO AUTHORITY OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES. Fucking insular Americans.
Doesn't the statistic go that the top selling beer in London is Fosters?
I agree that no Australian in their right mind would drink Fosters. During the Olympics here in Sydney they had a massive marketing blitz - including a vain effort to boost sales - a buy-one-fosters-get-another-free promotion.
They couldn't even give the stuff away...
Still they had a half-decent ad campaign during the olympics.
Another beer urban legend is that CUB introduced Melbourne Bitter into NSW after shifting the brewing of NSW-distro Victoria Bitter to Sydney. Seems everyone noticed the taste change when they stopped using water from the Yarra and used Sydney tap water instead... ie. Melbourne Bitter is the old VB brewed in Melbourne. Anyone confirm?
*** I am the real stylewagon
Is it is as good as Airport?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
There must be a lot of unused BSB satellite dishes kicking around the UK worth practically zip by now Also with people dumping their old sky dishes for 'digi dishes' for sky digital pretty soon their will be a lot of old sky dishes going cheap Sod the weather, surely it would be worth setting up a network live this just for gaming and mirroring stuff like DVD decryption software maybe ?...
I'm not 100% positive, but I'm pretty sure wireless phones (the ones you have a base station for a ground line, not cell or pcs) have the FCC in their pocket for the 2.4ghz range. Quite a shame really, I'd love to run around town with a constant connection to the net.(read: not with one of those silly little phones)
Good luck to anyone thinking of talking the FCC into giving up any air space for such an endevour. They rake in millions by selling the air to private corps, and are not likely to just give it away in an effort to "do the right thing", I'm affraid.
disc-chord
"though we say, 'all information should be free', it is not... information is power and currency in the virtual world we inhabit."-Billy Idol (1994)
I read recently during the pre-Olympic hype that Fosters only has something like 2% of the beer market in Australia. Fosters was also actually started by 2 Americans who opened a brewery in Australia.
Since there's a whole bunch of questions on this, and I've got some experience in this arena, I'll impart some of my knowledge.
No, it's not illegal. The 2.4Ghz band is a public band, so it's not tightly regulated by the FCC. It's a real pain in the ass when you've got a whole bunch of people running in the frequency range in the same area though,... (Guess how I know this?)
Provided you could get a signal, you'd be able to connect to the network from anywhere. All you need is a wireless ethernet card, and the information on how to connect to the network. (I currently have two different wireless PCMCIA cards, and should be getting a third soon). An actual "dish" is not necessary.
"Rain Fade" isn't really an issue, unless you're talking HEAVY rain. Rain Fade is a lot more of a problem when you're actually going through the cloud cover (a-la Satellite). The wireless stuff they're doing doesn't work that way.
That about covers it. BTW, the company that I work for is getting into this technology REALLY heavy in the US. Especially since Cisco bought Aironet, which has a wirless system that communicates at 11Mbps. That's pretty damn fast for radio, people.
I've been called a "Fucking Dick" by better people than you.
Anyone ever used DirectTV dishes for this sort of thing? I know they are expensive right now, but in the long term they might become cheap.
Thx.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
The article says that they're using mostly old helical type antennas, no reference to sattelite dishes. Think about it, with a dish you need line of site, usually to a sattelite although, you could problably set up some type of dish to dish relay system but that would require an impossible network of dishes. These guys are using omni-directional RF to do this. There's no way dishes could be used for a system like this unless it was a simple point to point connection and even then, I don't think you'd be able to use the WaveLan cards mentioned in the article. So don't get your hopes up for that collapsible, portable laptop connected take anywhere dish cause the reality is even better-AFAIK the hardware is small and can be made extremely portable you just have a limited travel range.
So, let me see.. this means that I could go for a walk through Canberra and get hit be some stray signal from a mpeg featuring Pamela Anderson hard at work??
Awesome!
I think LoboNet gets their technology from uSurf America that has several patents on the technology. They are the parent company of CyberHighway, a nationawide ISP.
These old wireless cable systems are all over the country, Sprint has bought up a lot of them.
By the way, there are no satellites involved. Why does everyone assume that a dish antenna has to be for satellite?
Work for Change & GET PAID!
thx.
Now all I have to do is get it in Canada.
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
Why would you EVER pay for a T1 to connect to "the building next door" when you can get a laser or microwave link for a ONE TIME COST reoughly half that of the monthly charge for your T1??? And it would be FASTER???
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I have to agree that Fosters is crap. Knowing that Australians don't actually drink it makes me have a bit more respect for them.
Personally I prefer James Boag's Premium Lager. Like Cascade, it's brewed in Tasmania, and Boag's has recently been bought out by San Miguel (big Philippines-based multinational brewer) so you might actually get a chance to find the stuff overseas now. Very smooth drink.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Seeing as nobody seems to have mentioned it, there's a similar initiative being started by consume.net, aiming to do much the same thing around London in the UK. The first masts are going up at the moment, and apparently you can get quite a good range from the `Sarah Lee antenna', i.e. made out of a cake tin and coathangers :-) Maybe somebody who's actually used one can fill me in here, but the mention of it on the mailing list made me laugh.
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
An interesting point is that when Carlton & United (the makers of Fosters) export Foster it is not the same as what you get in oz. It is actually Crown Larger which, in Australia, is a "premium" local beer. .au.
So Foster in other parts of the world is better than in
Just my input on this (off)topic.
I think the Aussie cricket team drinks XXXX too... because it is free. At the Olympics, all I saw was Fosters, it was pretty funny. It was actually the first time I had ever drunk a genuine Foster's Lager. I have got into that Foster's Extra stuff, but it isn't quite the same now is it... VB forever! BJ
Well it couldn't possibly be any _worse_ than it is in .au!!!
Crown is quite nice IMHO, especially with a wicked curry.
I didn't realise people really drunk XXXX, except in rural Queensland?
For Australians in the UK (such as myself), here's some happy news: VB distribution seems to be improving. It's imported from Oz, and Sainsburys is stocking it (at some stores in London, at any rate) at a reasonable price.
Woo!
The pubs i've seen it in seem to charge about £2.50 (~AUS$6.25) for a can...
...j
I might point out that as of March 17, Iridium was no longer functional in it's original sense. As a matter of fact the last functioning systems are now down as of Sept 1. The following is a little link regarding the previous:
Dear Valued Motorola Customer:
As you know, Iridium LLC ended commercial service on March 17 of this year. Since then, some limited Iridium service has continued to be available in some geographic areas, depending on the operational status of the various Gateways and Service Providers, while the plan for decommissioning the Iridium System was being finalized. As we have indicated in our communications with our customers, and Gateways and Service Providers around the world, since March 17, there has been the possibility that any remaining Iridium service could end at anytime, without any advance notice.
More of this can be found at the following: http://www.mot.com/satellite/info/
Check out This page at The Register
;)
To quote...
"Revolutionary" products are announced daily in the IT business, but Psion's latest, the Wavefinder, could genuinely merit the tag on a couple of fronts. The price is only a temporary breakthrough, because receivers from the consumer electronics outfits will ultimately match and then beat it, but the association with PCs is a smart notion, as is the bundling approach. The Wavefinder, a sort of 'soap on a rope' affair you stick to the wall behind your PC, is bigger than you expected from the pictures, but there are obvious advantages for Psion in presenting it with a simple USB connection that allows it to get display, control and power from the PC 'for free.' And when it ships in the UK in two weeks time it will be free, for people buying the right PCs from retail giant Dixons/PC World. That's a tempting bundle that should help Psion punch above its weight, and steal a march on Japan's electronics giants.
The broader revolutions, however, are more easily grasped when you consider what digital radio is, and the implications of it becoming a ubiquitous PC peripheral. Digital radio currently exists as high quality, multi-channel audio broadcasting (in Europe - the US seems to be two years behind, with an inferior system, again), but although that's cool, start thinking of digital radio as the ability to throw miscellaneous free broadband stuff at computer users everywhere and you see rather wider potential.
It can do pictures, hook into Web sites, it can broadcast Web sites. You can be listening to a song, decide you like it, find out the name of the band then just click through to a Web site to buy the CD. Or - the fatal, Napster-style flaw in the thinking of people who think they'll make money out of this - you can just record it directly into MP3 format. Or look at it from the point of view of the wireless network operators who've just coughed up tens of billions for their 3G licences.
Their thinking, as far as broadband wireless is concerned, has been that they'll be able to use their vast future bandwidth for music, video, multimedia, and that they'll be able to recoup their investment by charging for this. So imagine their surprise in recent months when they've 'discovered' a bunch of broadband wireless franchises that were sold for a song, and that are now in the hands of broadcast operations who're familiar with the concept of dishing out content for free.
Sounds kinda similar to what you want, if you live in Europe you're in luck
This is more like a WAN, campus sized deal(or bigger). If only I didn't live in such an urban area I would buy a rig like this for almost any price to link up to work.
OK, so I always thought that sattelite dishes were used to RECEIVE stuff, which works fine for downstream. How is upstream handled?
Ñ'
2.4 GHZ Internet access does exist in the US, I should know, I helped design and build the network for the ISP. All Wavelan, different combos of antennas, shooting upwards of 11Mb at 3-20 miles out from a 23 story building. They were using LINUX ROUTER PROJECT as their customer premise router/NAT box, etc... Where you ask... Flint, Michigan of all places :)
Or Rachel Hunter or a couple of women on the Australian Soccer team or.... And please, like the US doesn't have it's fair share (or more, if you count ugliness due to post-implant probs.) of ugly women (and men)...
Jeff
www.tele2.co.uk
There's no real technical difference between the antenna a radio station uses to broadcast it's signal and the antenna on your car that you use to pick up that signal. The difference between a dish antenna and a linear antenna is that the dish is fairly directional whereas the linear antenna is omnidirectional.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Slashdot reported on some Mac users using their Airport cards and various antennas/dishes to accomplish similar things as our pals down under. http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/06/1235248.shtm l
Here is a link to the article referenced by Slashdot that details what these Mac users were doing.
http://macintouch.com/airportantenna.html
Besides, how cool would it be to be sitting in a restaurant with a satellite dish?
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Is there any Govermental Regulator like the FCC that would consider this type of communication against the law? Or is this the type of situation where the power of the dishes isn't large enough to have regulations? (although I would think it would be plenty of power) Just think of the possibilites with that type of system in any big US city... You possibly could take your laptop in your car (for cheap) just as long as you were in the signal's range.
I'll probably get Troll -1, or flamed for saying this, but does anyone really care about the "oh, and it runs on Linux!" tagline lately? It's getting to the point where if Joe Q. Schmuck's shoelace has Linux running on a 2" chip that suddenly this is a Slashdot-worthy article.. This is not news for nerd.. It's news for lamers. Now if you're going to put up a tutorial on writing a driver for this dinky little device, or one of the "making-of" type pages (as with the mega-cooled systems, the atari-handheld thing, etc), then I don't mind. But can we stop with the, "OOOOH! The article mentions the letters l-i-n-u-x in succession, let's post the sucker!!" stories? Just my thoughts
Dude, where do you get this stuff?
Honest question here. I doubt you're making this up yourself, and I want to see the real source of this.
Oh, and do stop with the goatse.cx linking in the sig, "Bob." No one (and it probably really is at least pretty close to "no one") wants to see that. Your trolling stands just fine on its own.
----------
A scene of a man eating a steak, and hooking an old dish into his 8088 computer
.sigs??
An aussie voice with aussie accent: Local area network
A can of fosters smacking the floor...
An aussie voice with aussie accent: Beer... Fosters... Australian for beer.
-- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I don't know about Australia, but here in the US there are strict limits on what you can do with te 2.4GHz band, including rather low caps on the total transmitting power which limits the range of any sort of home network.
Does anyone with experiance in the aussie equivelent of the FCC have any insight into this?
Oh, and the link in the article should point to www.air.net.au.
I read the internet for the articles.
Alternatively you could build your own.
If anyone has some old cards for sale at reasonable price, I am in the Perth area W.A!
cya, Andrew...
This is my sig, exciting huh!
If you can make a wireless LAN out of old satellite dishes, then you can surely transmit satellite TV from them also, can't you?
You can beam it into another user's satellite receiver, if he happens to be pointing at you (unlikely) or you're right off the edge of his dish (where most parabolic reflector antennas have a minor lobe.)
You'd have a tough time uplinking to the satellite. I understand the receivers are at a very different frequency from what the little piepans handle.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
using actuall satellites? I know for a fact that the HAM radio community has pulled together and gotten their own satellite put into orbit. How about an Open Source satellite system?. It would free us from commercial and governmental regulations. There is enough money out there , with all the dot com'mers and such poppin up...to do something like this. And with contributions from commercial organizations, the HW can be acquired. Its a real possibility...
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
The network described in the article uses WaveLAN cards connected to old dish antennas. You could do the same thing with just about any other parabolic antenna you might have access to (DirecTV, anyone?). At no time does the signal bounce off a satellite -- this is all line-of-sight between two or more ground-based nodes.
Please stop talking about Iridium or anything else in orbit. You are only making a fool of yourself by doing so.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Canberra has also been rolling out 'high capacity optic fibres to within 300 metres of individual homes. The last segment of the connection to the home consists of copper wires, similar to those used in office local area networks. The total bandwidth to every home is a massive 51mbps downstream and 1.6mbps upstream.' I think this is supposed to be a world first. I'm sure this must have already been covered. http://www.csu.edu.au/special/raiss99/papers/cvivi an/
Courtesy of the rock-solid and easy-to-setup Apple AirPort.. I have an Orinoco (nee WaveLAN) board in my W2k laptop (ProntoEdit and the TrueSync on my fone only work with Win32 :() and my signal is outstanding..
;) so I can compute out on the shared patio..
At work we demo'd a point2point wireless installation between 2 buildings using 14dB Yagi directional antennae. Solid connection even without direct line of sight (a couple of buildings in the way).. Very impressed..
Now I just have to get a nice amplified omnidirecitonal antenna for my apt (and hack into the airport to solder the antenna connection
Your Working Boy,
I always wondered if it would be possible to create some sort of mini-VLA with a bunch of Primestar dishes. I know this wouldn't be the easiest of tasks, but harder stuff has been done right? I mean, according to THIS article there were 2.3 million Primestar subscribers when DirecTV decided to buy them out. That means that there are about 2.3 million Primestar satellite dishes sitting around being useless.. there's gotta be something cool to use them for. Spiffy new high-speed file-sharing network? A VLA rival (I don't actually know if this would be possible because I'm not an astronomer)? Bah, the possibilities are endless.
So now people can take down the network just by bumping into the sattelite dishes and knocking them off track. Should definitely make life easier for the more malicious types out there :)
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Last time I checked the FCC doesn't regulate foreign countries.
Who would think of perverting a new bit of technical ingenuity for the use
:)
of pr0n? Surely there's no precedent for that??
Just think of cheap wireless combined with wearable computing. Nobody would
ever get anything done and downloading of pr0n would climb to unheard of levels.
No more T-1 to connect to the building next door. Where can I get the HW? HasH_Browns
scattered covered smothered chunked
Not to be hypocritical, but did the poster just mention the word "Linux" to get the article accepted more easily? I would have thought the hardware news would've carried on its own.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Academical and Research Network in Lithuania (LITNET) is widely using wavelan technology. For example radio network covers entire Vilnius city (it's our capital with ~700'000 population).
Check out the map of this network (I'm very lucky to live on one of those small red dots :)). We've recently upgraded most of our wavelans in Vilnius from 2mbit/s to 10mbit/s. It's a pitty this network has only 2mbit connection to the world.
If you wish to learn more about technology we use go here, to learn more about Litnet go here
This is actually becoming quite common in Australia. There are two projects I know of in Western Australia alone. The one Im involved in is the Perth LAN project. (Please be real gentle, the link its on is very slow. Ill see if I can get a mirror up.)
This project is based around spread spectrum WaveLAN cards, running at 11MB/s encrypted. The system is based around Debian routers, though there are a few windows boxes on the network at the moment. A link to tie this network into the internet is underway. (At the moment it relies on a tenuous routing arrangement from a collection of modems.)If you're interested in this please mail at:
intra@it.net.au
--or--
ryan@slowest.net
Without trying to start a flame war, get a clue mate. its in the Actual Article, its in Related links, and then you post this? If I didnt know better, Id classify it as 'flamebait' not 'redundant'. actually, Id have both.. :-)
"Go ahead, moderate me down."
Any country has an authority with the same goals as the FCC:
Set up limits for frequencies and radiation levels so that most people can use the air for communictions.
In my case, they are called "Telestyrelsen".
Torak - would you like that the strongest transmitter has the right to the air or is that just a bit too liberal?
-- From Denmark
Thanks. But I was using sarcasm to convey that point, Mr. Master of the Obvious.
------
Let me give you the lowdown
Here in New Mexico, a company called LoboNet uses 2.4GHz LAN/WAN radios from BreezeCOM with outdoor antennas to businesses in the more rural areas. (Near Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but too far for DSL or ISDN)
They have around a dozen customers, and there's no problem with the FCC, since the 2.4GHz spectrum is an non-license spectrum. As far as power levels go, I don't know. But it works quite nicely.
(Although for some reason LoboNet doesn't have any mention of it on their site... strange. But I know it's there! Maybe there's some mention at the Integrity Networking Solutions site, since many of the wireless networking customers go through them.)