HighWLAN

Big Dave Diode writes "A cool story about what happens when a bunch of bored nerds with a lot of wireless equipment takes a road trip. Intervehicle networking at 65 mph!"

Comments

Where's the danger? Can't people read?

[Anonymous Coward]

He wasn't "hacking while driving," he had a co-pilot. I don't see anything dangerous here.

"Meng rode with me in my Hyundai Tiburon acting as communications officer and uplink controller."

gear worth more than the car

[Anonymous Coward]

so lets see, between the laptops, the WAP, the inverter, 2 powerstrips(?), cell phone, etc... ...he tripled the value of that POS Hyundai? :-)

If he was operating that laptop while driving, that is extremely dangerous- at highway speeds, cars travel over a hundred feet a second, and it takes about 2-3 seconds from the time you take your eyes off the road to when you get focused back on the road, to check something out on the screen- much less READ something.

Maybe the guy should have just gone and bought a $50 CB radio. Or a Talkabout. I can understand a GPS unit and map software(esp for finding places to stay/eat) if you have a co-pilot, but if you're solo, leave the laptops in the trunk and DRIVE THE FUCKING CAR.

Ever seen the bumper stickers that say "SHUT UP AND DRIVE"?

Apple's Software base station

[azav]

This is saddly, a non event. With one Mac laptop with an airport card installed, you can turn on "Software base station" and that mac becomes your wireless hub.

Turn on personal web and file sharing and put a 1 hour mp3 mix on your web folder. Have the other guy on a pc or mac in the other car, plug their audio output into their car stereo and you have audio streaming over wireless from car to car.

Why throw a linksys into the mix when you don't need it?

Very interesting... it's been done

[Tacky the Penguin]

The writer was very creative in his use of off-the-shelf equipment. His experiment is a good proof-of-concept.

Amateur (Ham) Radio Operators have been communicating via packet radio for something like twenty years. Since ham radios are used, the range is measured in miles rather than feet. The only drawback of that system is that the speed is limited to 1200 baud -- though higher baud rates are used on some of the higher bands. In fact, some hams use tcp/ip as their protocol (originally, packet radio used ax.25).

For more information, check out news:alt.ham-radio.packet.

Digital radio communication is actually much older than even packet radio. Technically, morse code is a digital medium. Somewhat later, baudot code was used, and hams communicated via RTTY (Radio Teletype). I'm not sure when the first RTTY station hit the air, but I suspect that it was in the 1940s or 1950s. Later, ASCII was used for RTTY, which had the advantage of lower-case letters and more characters.

Packet Radio became popular in the 1980s, and the innovative hams used it for emergency communications, bulliton boards, email, and vehicluar communication. Some attached GPS units to the TNCs (Terminal Node Controllers), so a central station could track several mobile units. This turned out to be very useful for "fox hunting" (searching for hidden transmitters), and the more serious searches for emergency locator beacons and for illegal transmitters.

The police have been using a form of packet radio for at least ten years, and probably for a whole lot longer (I saw one ten years ago). Rather than calling your license number into the dispacher, they can type it into the terminal and get a direct text reply.

The military also uses wireless digital communication. They used RTTY way back in the ancient times when I was serving (no, we didn't use flintlock rifles). I used to repair the encryption devices that secured the links.

The author expressed some doubt about securing a wireless link, but I am confident that any communication that the military is currently researching is well secured. They have been using crypto gear for a very long time. Rather than take a chance on being accused of divulging classified information, I will just suggest that you type "comsec crypto" into google and surf from there.

The point is that once you encrypt the data, you can send it over any channel you like without fear of eavesdroppers.

Incidentally, hacking the 802.11 box to produce more power is almost certainly illegal. The FCC takes a dim view of unlicenced people modifying type-accepted gear.

I haven't researched the issue, but I believe that a ham can legally modify an 802.11 box. I am quite sure that it is legal if the operating frequency is moved to one of the ham bands (I don't recall if it is already in a "shared" band). Doing so will create other issues that I won't bother to get into right now, though.

One final word of advice: Move the antenna OUTSIDE the vehicle. It'll work a whole lot better.