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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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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"?
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!
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"?
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.
To my understanding, the limits are only on the outer edges of the band.
2.4GHz is an ISM band(Industry, Science, Medical), so it gets used by microwaves, X-Ray machines, etc. It's not a licensed band, and is mostly kept open for noise generated by these devices.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
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.)