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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?
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" :)
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
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.
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.
Surely they call themselves "Canberries"...
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Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
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Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
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.
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.
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?
Galaxy wasn't a satellite system. It was a surface pay TV system based on microwave transmissions from Telstra tower on black mountain.
All that the air.net.au people are using are the now disused microwave antennas - they can often be collected free from people who used to have Galaxy. That makes a very cheap way of getting an ~18dBi antenna.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
It most certainly is point to point. There's no way you'd get the distances covered here with omnidirectional within the legal power limits. The Galaxy antennas aren't "satellite dishes" as such (Galaxy was a surface system), just directional microwave antennas.
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
You don't need an actual satellite. You just use satellite dishes. The dishes point at each other. They don't point into the skies. They're all pointing at somebody elses dish nearby.
The Galaxy "satellite" dishes didn't point at a satellite either. They pointed at a local transmission tower (Telstra Tower, or as all the locals call it, Black Mountain Tower).
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
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"?
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
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
This type of system would require an existing Satelite system, such as "Galaxy." Other cities could put a satelite up simply for this purpose, but that would take away the economics of it all.
Would be much cheaper to run digital lines (phone/cable), and then you wouldn't have to have a sat-dish.
But it's still cool, just doesn't make sense in somewhere like NYC.
Might work in rural areas though, they usually have sat-dishes already (for TV) and with the new dishes most places in hicksvilles have a large unused dish and a smaller one for TV.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
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.
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
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,
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
More precisely, this type of system would require a defunct Satelite system, such as "Galaxy". Or a hardware hacker willing to show you how to make a 2.4GHz antenna.
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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.)
Or a software hacker willing to show you how to make a working satellite system defunct!