802.11 for Vehicles?

mantid asks: "I am about to do a long trip (1 year) in a VW Vanagon, and would like to set up wireless net access from within the vehicle. What is the most effective system for hassle-free, permanent, long-term installation? Note, this is not just for wardriving, many truckstops, netcafes, and coffee shops are now offering legit net access. I just don't want to have to bring laptop inside to do it. Please suggest tried and true antenna types as well as tips/concerns/issues."

Comments

Why Wi-Fi?

[adolf]

My boss has a wireless account with Verizon, and a self-contained PCMCIA device to access it. All-you-can-eat bandwidth from wherever you happen to be in the US that you can see a tower from for ~$70/mo.

It seems reliable, and fast enough that I didn't get pissed off doing typical web browsing.

For double-extra-special bonus points, add an external antenna.

Or, just go ahead and do the Wi-Fi thing. Might be cheaper, and is sure to be faster and less available.

Build an antenna, or buy an antenna, or whatever.

If I were feeling cheap, I'd start with a cell phone antenna and then cut it to length for the correct frequency. If I were feeling spendy, I'd buy a high-gain omni from Tessco and invest a lot of time mounting and cabling it.

Then just plug the kit into your Proxim/Orinoco/Lucent card, drive to town, and waste half a day looking for a legitimate hotspot.

Brings me back

[d99-sbr]

Brings me back to the summer of 2001, when my friends and I went on a road trip for a few weeks. In the vehicle we had a setup consisting of:

* 5 laptops
* 802.11b network
* 1 GPRS cell phone (~20 kBit, and free of charge at that time)
* 1 Bluetooth card in one of the laptops, interfacing the cell phone.

So in essence all but one of the laptops relied on three separate radio links: WLAN to the gateway, bluetooth from the gateway to the cell phone, and GPRS/GSM to the "net". Funny thing was it actually worked surprisingly well.

We didn't do any serious latency or throughput tests, but everybody was able to use IM and email, and the more patient of us could even browse the net.

DashPC

[lcde]

A good site is www.dashpc.com. Although this guy has a lot of stuff in his, a simple setup of a computer and such may be all you need.

I am looking for a simular setup and plan on using the Senao 200mW wireless card to boost performance from within the car.

Vehicle-mounted ACCESS POINT?...

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I've been toying with a related idea - but instead of setting up a 'client' system, I was considering trying to set up a portable "access point" and internal "network" in a vehicle.

I find it odd that even today nobody blinks if someone says they're building a LAN and doesn't mention internet access, but if someone says "wifi" it's automatically assumed it's only for The Internet(tm)...

I'm thinking of taking a "scrounged" ancient laptop, Prism 2/2.5/3-based 802.11b card, hostap (is there a hostap-type linux driver for prism GT chipsets yet?), and a trimmed down linux distro running dhcp, dns, and web servers (maybe even Samba) to provide 'local network only' connections to passers by as I travel, just as an experiment. Maybe even some sort of 'chat' facility. (Mainly just because I'm curious how many people would notice, how many people would immediately disconnect when they got the "this doesn't provide internet access" page, and how many would browse the [legally] free downloads, "sign" the guestbook, and so on...)

On the other hand, I'd also like to figure out how to interface with Kismet so as to "pause" it when a potentially-open network is detected and have a script check to see if it's REALLY open (a lot of "open" networks seem to still restrict by MAC address, or aren't running DHCP servers, or otherwise are not designed to be connected to by just anyone) and perhaps "burst" a quick email send/recieve as I drive by before having Kismet resume scanning...