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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."
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.
Kid-proof tablet..
(This is a little off topic, but hopefully not too far.)
I've used FlyingJ hotspots on the road, and you don't really need a special antenna -- in general, the reception is fine from inside the car with a normal pcmcia wifi card.
The parking lots are pretty big, and there are places where the reception isn't great, but it's usually pretty easy to drive to another part of the lot to improve your signal. I worked under the theory that the networks were designed to provide the best signals to the truckers, so I tended to park closer to the truck section.
Most of the problems I had seemed to be caused by mistakes on the FlyingJ side of things. I think they had a fairly bloody roll out. In order to user their system, you have to create an account and login.
You do that by pulling up a browser, and letting it detect the proxy server settings automatically. If you haven't logged in, the proxy server redirects you to a page where you can submit your cc or login if you already have an account.
I found that at a lot of locations, things weren't working. My computer couldn't find the proxy server, or whatever. At a couple of locations the system was just open -- there was no login, and it worked fine.
In general, though, it's pretty cool. The FlyingJ's were spaced out so that I could check my email and surf the web a couple of times a day. It's not expensive, and when it works, it works pretty well. I could use ssh and vnc to pull up my home desktop, and it was useable.
I bought the cheapest accounts, 15 minutes at a time. That turned out to be a good plan, mostly because some truck stops didn't have working networks.
It's tempting to look at your route and tell yourself, "I'll be able to hit these two other truck stops in the next 24 hours -- so I'll save money and buy a 24 hour account." The problem is that sometimes the next truck stop didn't work when I got there. It would have sucked to have paid more, expecting to be able to use a wireless net that was down.
I took two road trips, one maybe 8 months ago, and another about 6 months ago, and the FlyingJ system was substantially more reliable the second time around. So I'd expect them to have something reasonably solid now, But I wouldn't pay for a long term account until I *knew* it was solid.
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.
Which is all very nice and well.. but it is not what he wants, and doesn't answer his question.
One shouldn't project ones own values onto everyone else.
"When I grow up, I want to be a weirdo"
Why not bike?
-- Smell the smells, hear the sounds.
Why not fly?
-- Quicker way to get there
Why are these answers wrong? Because he didn't ask the question....
He said "I am about to do a long trip (1 year) in a VW Vanagon", he didn't say I'm driving around the US drawing big sketches of the people I meet and things I see what are some tablet PC's or good drawing tablets for my PC.
What is he's a traveling salesmen that needs to keep up w/ his email, or log his sales, create invoices, surf the web to keep up w/ news etc.
It's usually good when someone asks a question to answer it...
You might consider using wifinder.com or wi-fihotspotlist.com to find out where your next hotspot will be. Just make sure to copy down several locations for possible next destinations -- you'd hate to get to your next spot and discover it missing and have no way to access the internet to find a hotpsot.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The best way to get 802.11b/g coverage from your vehicle is to use a real external antenna. This leaves you with two options - buy something that's magnetic mount (easily available on the Net) or punch a hole in the roof and put a real antenna and mount in.
For my 2.4 solution, I installed an "NMO" antenna mount on the roof of my Expedition (drilling holes doesn't bother me - there's a total of 15 antennas mounted on the roof using NMO mounts, each of which requires a 3/4"-diameter hole).
First, find you an 802.11 card with an external antenna connector. The Orinoco 802.11b-only Gold works very nicely. Buy a pigtail to convert from the little push-on connector on the edge of the card (MCX?) to something more standard, like an N.
Next, buy the appropriate mount and antenna. The mount coax will be somewhat inflexible and will have a solid center conductor, so you'll need to be careful not to crush/damage it.
Maxrad mounts
And an antenna:
Maxrad antennas
I use the BMAXC24503 model. The 5db gain is nicer, but longer.
Drill a hole in the roof, install the mount, run the coax down through one of the pillars, connect to your pigtail, and connect to the card. You'll be amazed at the difference over your internal "antenna" (more like a dummy load.)
Installing antennas (drilling holes in the roof) is not for the faint of heart. Check with your local 2-way radio installers, and they might be able to put the antenna in for you for not too much money.
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.
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...
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