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Ricochet Bounces Back, Cautiously
SimHacker writes: "An article in salon.com reports that the Ricochet wireless network will be bouncing back from the dead! Aerie Networks, who purchased Metricom's Ricochet network for $8.25 million, is going to offer the service in markets where it was popular, like Southern California and the Bay Area. They're also planning to lower the price of the modem from $300 to $100, and lower the monthly flat rate fee from $80 to $50. Ricochet is hardly the perfect wireless network, but it's much faster and more reliable than CDPD, so I'm really looking forward to signing back up."
Roichochet makes CPCD look like a joke. It's based on packet radio technology and the infrastructire design is closer to a military setup than anything you can do with cellular. You can communicate modem to modem directly WITHOUT paying for service, and if you pay then you can connect MODEM to MODEM through the Richochet network.
It's really cool.. My forst wireless network was a pair of their 19.2 modems... with mods to the base station I set up I could get about 3000-5000 feet range.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Partially true, I worked for Metricom in the engineering department for two years before they went kaputz. The S-register you refer to 304 was actually the data terminal speed. This register controlled the speed at which the radio talked to the computer it was connected to. Setting this speed at a maximum, as most of you old school BBS freaks know is always recommended. setting the S 304 register to 0 would let it autodetect the data terminal speed up to 57.6kbps. I personally set it to 115200 to get the maximum possible throughput even though it really didn't matter with the Gen 1 radios. This is not the same as the speed at which the radios talk to each other however. The poletops for the Gen 1 network (33.6 or 28.8 or whatever you want to call it) were entirely different animals than the 128k radios. The 128k poletops could talk to the Gen 1 radios, but you could not get Gen 1 poletops to talk to 128k radios at 128k speed. This is also why it is recommended to use the USB cable when using the 128k radios. The maximum a serial connection would let you download at is about 10k because of the 115200 limitation. Most people don't have high speed serial ports, don't know they have em, or whatnot, so even though the 128k radios work with a high speed serial (about 460kpbs IIRC) it was a big hastle. I can remember trying to get test setups in the lab to work with high speed serial but there were too many cabling attenuation/interference problems to get it to work that fast all the time. Serial cables are simply not designed to handle that kind of signaling speed. USB was better suited for the fast transfer rates and is why you should use it whenever you can. Trust me, they had to roll out completely new poletops in the entire Bay Area when they upgraded systems. I remember taking a "Woody" radio home and using it on the 28.8k network until they turned on the new poletops. I am afraid you are misunderstood about the 304 register and hopefully this cleared things up a little. If anyone out there can add more to this, I'd be glad; it's been a while since I worked at Metricom.