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Cringely: Wi-Fi in the Sky
Boiled Frog writes "In Cringely's latest article, he describes his plan to test a wi-fi connection between his house and his plane using two LinkSys 802.11g routers. He plans to experiment with various antennas to see which works the best."
Sounds cool...I'm anxious to hear what antennas actually matter.
Sometimes, this Cringely guy just makes me cringe...
He takes a rather quick review of the geek-unfriendly regulations in the sky, and then simply says that because he doesn't believe in them he's going to openly ignore them.
At least he'll be using his own plane, so the only life he's risking in this situation is his own and maybe one or two willing others. Part of the reason why the FAA is over-sensative over what's going on within commerical airplanes is because if the unthinkable random frequency collision were to happen, it might cause an instrument to give a wrong reading to the pilot and the result would be hundreds of people being killed. That's rather high stakes to be guessing...
In sad but related news, Robert Cringely passed away today in a private plane crash. Investigators blame bad weather and the fact that Mr. Cringely was Surfing The Damn Internet while aloft.
Please bid on this Karmann Ghia! Please pleas
I like hyperlinks on the intarweb as much as the next guy, but isn't this Cringely column stalking a bit excessive?
who's gonna fly it whilst he's doing this?
perhaps he could set the wi-fi link up so he can remote control his plane.
Nobody needs p0rn that badly... I hope
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
It seems unlikely that antennas would be sufficient from any significant distances, but it sounds like we're talking satellites here.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
really.. who cares ?
i'm planning to wash my car this weekend, anyone intrested ? i can write a plan too...
AC
"Oh! I can PING my house!"
I say he uses a pringles can with a GPS that tracks him and points the pringles can in the right direction.
AccountKiller
Someday somebody's going to have to explain the whole war-driving/war-flying type thing to me... I really don't see the appeal in doing all this seemingly pointless stuff with wireless just to watch a few numbers fluctuate on a laptop. (I'm sure a lot of you think I should be banned from slashdot for saying that though). (Also, who names their kid "channing?" or "cole" for that matter? The quality of child naming has really gone down of late...)
What an insensitive thing to say.
Learn some manners, michael.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Right now, many aviation headsets come equipped to work with your regular mobile phone, suggesting that at this moment there are probably hundreds or thousands of people flying around in little planes and yacking their heads off. Yet for some reason the mobile phone companies don't seem to be complaining. Have you heard any complaints?
A few rare rulebreakers won't have as much affect on the network as if the rule was repealed and everybody on the plane was doing it. If 200 people on a plane flying overhead are on their cell phones, that'll be a much different situation than what's never really been tested.
Cringely found to be flying accidentally over Cuba as his instruments get messed up from the wi-fi signal...
There is a european program called ATENAA which is trying to implement (amongst other things) a wireless connection with atm and adhoc networks.
See this link for more... Eurocontrol
-mse
Fiat Lux.
He will discover that it doesn't work above 8000 ft.
A guy in Canada has already tried it.
Why not install wirelles Ap's in traffic signals? There sure are enough of them around in urban areas but would be trouble some in some areas of the country where some towns only have a stop sign.
And I thought that people talking on the cell phone while driving were bad!
-Peter
I have been sitting at home using my hands free with my phone by my monitor and it totally jacks my display. It also tends to interfere with my speakers. A lot of the time I can see the interference on my monitor before the phone even starts to ring, although I think a lot of the time it ends up just being the phone checking to see if I have messages or anything. In any event, I really find it annoying when my monitor has sync problems, but if the navigational equipment on a plane starts acting up there are much bigger problems than not being able to play Counter Strike.
Sorry Bob, someone beat you to it.
But i'd still be interested to see the results of a bi-directional test..
Would you call this technique HiWiFi or HighWiFi?
I'm not sure about anyone else, but when I'm flying between Chicago and Boston I never have any cell reception on my phone when we're in the air.
The crude, fast, and suprisingly useful approximation for line-of-sight as a function of height: range=(sqrt(2*height)) where range is in miles and height is in feet. Inverse-square losses will eat into your link budget, but you'd be suprised... 2 watt satellites in orbits @ 300Km can be heard with handheld scanners. I suspect he'll want to use an antenna with modest gain and a hemispherical pattern... a K5OE patch feed for 2.4GHz ought to be good enough, but just don't expose that thing to 100 KIA+ airspeeds.
"... symbiotic relationship where aircraft owners benefit from volunteering the use of their planes by getting free airborne Internet service"
... but the cheese has slid off his cracker if he thinks pilots are going to volunteer their plane and/or their time to fly around so those below can surf.
As a proof of concept, sure
Wi-Fi in the sky with diamonds?
... wants to deduct his flying expenses.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
But on a commercial flight where you have the potential of 300+ people all using cell phones, PDA's, CD players, and computers I think the potential for disastrous consequences increases dramatically. That is why so rules are still in place.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I must say, this sounds like an excellent idea, but what about those rural areas where planes don't always fly, and what about if an airport grounds flights for any length of time, such as happened on 9/11? It seems to me that a better solution must be found if we're to obtain reliable network connectivity from such a system, as opposed to just cheap spotty access. But if nothing else, I give credit to Cringley for some very interesting ideas about the possibilities!
plan to test a wi-fi connection between his house and his plane...
Yes, and I'm about to test my wi-fi roaming capability from my rocket car in the Bonneville flats. Next week, I'm going to test the reception distance of my Pringle's can antenna from the deck of my 75' yacht on my way to the Bahamas to my other beach house....
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Some guy in his own homebuilt plane, flying in unrestrcited airspace VFR trying to work out answers to questions a lot of pilots have.
If the Wright brothers were alive today, they'd still be completing the paperwork to build an airplane.
Seems like I remember Boeing taking up one of their planes loaded with electronics equipment, trying to test out this interference issue. They got zero interference. But it is always possible. Somebody needs to put this whole line of fear-mongering to rest. Godspeed to the guy.
Cringely consistently discusses radio with inaccurate technical descriptions. I've been on email threads in which he responds to critics who try to get him to be more accurate with statements about how he's trying to popularize technology and that people should just try interesting, weird things. From his never-again-discussed passive billboard antenna -- against the laws of physics and he never provided promised details to the Bay Area Wireless User's Group -- to his Why-Fi proposal (completely prima facie unrealistic and contradictory) to his "stick an antenna up at maximum gain and serve a neighborhood" essays a few weeks ago...
Well, why does he get Slashdot's attention any more?
Oh, I forget. As he said in that string of email I mention, he has 200,000 readers, thus making him an expert.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
Picture yourself as a packet on a signal,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody SYNS you, you ACK quite slowly,
A Port with kaleidoscope eyes.
LCD flowers of yellow and green,
Towering over your head.
Look for the Port with the sun in her eyes,
And she's gone.
WIFI in the sky with diamonds.
WIFI in the sky with diamonds.
. . . . Of course, I'm still trying to cool my overclocked Pentium 4 with a Nissan Sentra radiator - - but THAT'S worthwhile.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
You'd call it Airport, of course.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
He mentions that there are up to 1000 small IFR aircraft in the air in the USA at any one time and that these could have a mesh network between them and this could provide a cellular network for planes. I think not somehow, as he states in the article mesh networks only work effecitvely with 3 hops or less and that a reasonable range is 10km using directional antennas.
Firstly all 1000 planes aren't going to carry signals and the ones that do will need to be in range of a base station on the ground. In order to keep a connection going these planes would have to be constantly adjusting their antennas to point at ground stations and at the other plane.
Secondly at certain times of day/certain (most) places there won't be enough planes to give the range. Perhaps above major cities you can guarentee coverage most of the time, but elsewhere you won't be able to.
Thirdly, I doubt 1000 planes (flying their usualy patterns) could provide anywhere near 100% coverage of the air corridors in the USA. And you'll still need a base station every 30km, isn't this about what the current solutions use if not more?
I love the way Cringely always takes concepts like this over the top strecting them far beyond what is pratical.
I'm sorry, I don't buy this. If planes are so reliant on all these telemetry signals that a bunch of electronic devices in the cabin could cause them to crash because the pilots cannot possibly look at the instruments, look out the window, and figure out something's wrong, I don't know how any airline managed to stay in business or keep any sort of plane in the air before, say, 1995. Without GPS and the (incredibly consistent) global air-traffic radar systems, why, you couldn't so much as fly a plane over a country with whom your at war to drop a bomb.
It depends on your flight conditions. I assume Cringely is flying VFR (Visual Flight Rules), so if he is a competent pilot familiar with the aircraft, he should theoretically be able to fly his aircraft without any instruments (of course, landing without an airspeed indicator can get your pulse going a little).
However, an airline (or private plane) flying IFR (instrument flight rules) in the soup NEEDS a working attitude indicator and other navigational equipment, as well as communication with ATC, in order to fly safely. The AI allows you to keep the right side of the plane up when you can't see the horizon outside (had JFK Jr. not been such an arrogant, reckless imbecel and had the proper training, this knowledge could well have saved his life), the navigational equipment helps you go where you belong and avoid obsticles you can't see due to clouds, like radio towers and mountains, and the communications with ATC keeps you from hitting someone else flying in the same cloud.
His radio equipment isn't going to affect his gyro and vacuum gear at all (so he won't lose his attitude indicator, airspeed indicator, altimeter, or what have you), but it could very well interfere with navigational and communcations equipment (I've had my cell phone completely jam my comms on one occasion, and while that is rare, it does happen. It happened to me, on the ground while trying to get ATIS, before I turned it off). That could well be a problem if he's flying over a major city talking to ATC and doesn't realize he isn't hearing what they are telling him.
The upshot of all of this? If he's VFR and doing it in an area where he doesn't have to talk to ATC, then, assuming he's a competent pilot who has a passenger messing with the radio gear while he does what he is supposed to be doing -- flying the plane -- he shouldn't have any real trouble. Other than violating various FCC regulations, of course, but that is between him and the FCC.
If he's doing this while required to talk to ATC, he's being foolish. If he's on an IFR flight plan while doing this, he's almost as stupid as JFK Jr.
My bet is on the first scenerio.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I actually have been looking for the capability to network a laptop in the air with a base station on the ground. Something that a search group that I work with would love to be able to do is pass imagery from the plane (low and slow planes with fair to good pilots) to the base, preferably without having to fly all the way back. Some of the newer protocols that are coming out soon sound very promising.
Didn't Tom's Hardware already do a story on this?
The FAA does not prohibit airborn cell phone usage, the FCC does. (The FCC does this because an airborn cell phone ties up channels on MULTIPLE cells like a denial of service attack.)
The FAA does prohibit anything that can interfere with aircraft systems. For VFR the pilot (PIC) can determine this, for IFR the equipment has to pass other tests and the PIC does not have as much discression.
A few years ago, I was doing some contract work for a company that does the installs for some of the GSM base stations here in Australia.
During a conversation with one of the techs the subject of the ban on mobile phones came up. His comment was that the phone transmitters are too low powered to affect the plane's systems, but that if 300 passengers on a plane travelling at 400kmh+ all had phones on, the handover process from cell to cell would be swamped and there would be a trail of crashed cellular base stations behind each passenger plane.
Better than crashing the planes, but still enough of a problem to insist on a ban on phones, and if you want people to co-operate, linking their cooperation to their own safety is about as good an incentive as you're going to get.
A light plane travelling at 200kph won't cause the same problem, so nobody worries about enforcing the ban for them.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
There is a world of difference between 250ft and 25000ft.
At 250ft, you might be able to see 10 cell towers, but each of them will have a different Digital Color Code - a code used to differentiate between adjacent cell sites on the same frequency.
Also, those 10 cells will each have their own frequency assignements - cells are laid out in a more or less hexagonal pattern with no adjacent cells sharing the same channel assignments.
So hanging off your tower, you might see 10 cells, but you are not likely to see 2 cells with the same frequency plan and DCC.
At 25000 feet, you WILL see multiple cells with the same DCC and frequency - and each of those cells will be trying to talk to your phone.
Also, there is the matter of speed. Hanging off your tower, you aren't moving very much relative to the cells (at least, one HOPES you are not). As a result, there is very little Doppler shift to your phone, and the time-of-flight from your cell to the tower is not changing. In a jet moving at 300-600kts, there is a non-trivial Doppler frequency shift to content with, but more importantly, the time of flight to the cell tower is changing rapidly. If your phone cannot compensate, it will start transmitting out of its assigned time slot, screwing up the adjacent time slots (other people's calls). Most phones' tracking loops are not set up to handle a relative velocity that high.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Fact 2. Cell phones (esp. GSM) are some of the noisiest devices. If you don't believe me listen to radio and start dialing a number. Although they don't work on the same band, the distortion will be pretty obvious.
Fact 3. The vast majority of planes still use analog signaling between sensors and board (as opposed to digital), which is particularly susceptible to noise.
I'm just wondering - if a crash happens because of electromagnetic interference, how many useful clues would the black box give ?
The Raven
He'd be lucky to get a link if the two routers were sitting together on a table in his kitchen. Don't even get me started on Linksys, because they really suck since Cisco took over. I haven't purchased a decent product from them for over a year now.
Example: against my better judgment, last month I bought a pair of WET54Gs for a customer for $160/each to use as a wireless bridge in conjunction with two 14dbi directional antennae. After dropping the connection numerous times per day and managing only a paltry 5 meg/sec transfer rate, I replaced them with two Netgear WGE101s for $90/each. No dropped connections; 18 meg/sec transfer.
Somebody tell Cringely to do himself a huge favor and try a D-Link DI624 or some other capable piece of equipment!
Why do I suddenly hear "WiFi in the Sky with Diamonds" playing in my head? Perhaps I've been listening to too much Beatles.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Hmmm, last time I heard 802.11g wasn't approved for outdoor use as of yet... But then again, who cares?
Hmm, last time I checked, the FCC hadn't approved 802.11g for outdoor point-to-point communications as of yet. But then again, who cares?
Since the plane is mobile, a fixed directional antenna won't help much (though one that directed most energy upward from the ground station and one that pointed generally down from the plane would be better than an isotropic radiator). A moving antenna that tracks the aircraft's transponder or an APRS device might be reasonable, but difficult to build. What might work better is to use a 200 mw card (like one from zcomax or senao - most cards are about 35mw to allow greater spacial reuse). Or you could use an external 1 watt amplifier.
I'm more interested in the routing protocols for connection handoffs between base stations. AODV and DSR were shown experimentally to handle extremely high mobility of large numbers of nodes.
-jim
His previous "mountain repeater" claim was debunked as an out-and-out lie, I believe that's why he took down his forums. He has little grasp on the details behind wireless technology, why increase his stature as a tech pundit with a link from Slashdot?
Rhymes better too.
NASA Ames Research Center tried this from a light twin aircraft three or four years ago with good results. AFAIK they were using 802.11b. As I recall they used an off-the-shelf antenna on the belly of he aircraft and transmitted data to a ground station in Hawaii. I can't recall if they used a directional antenna on the ground station or one of the high gain following antennas they have.
Nate
think "cole" and "channing" are bad? then you ain't see this.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
end of message
creation science book
Making a cantenna using a pringles can and a 1/4 wavelength helical antenna, mounted on an old DirecTV or DISH Network satellite dish. Thats what I do to get WIFI from the city on the other side of the island I'm on... i get 10+ miles range O.O. (Linksys WAP11 accesspoints)
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
I got 200 miles at 5000 ft. There are big problems with the link budget at those distances however.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"He's using the Sveasoft and two Linksys devices to accomplish something that would be much easier to do using the radio management features of a Cisco 1200 AP and Cisco PCMCIA NIC card. You can measure path loss directly from the utilities that ship with the firmware.
The TNC connectors support a huge variety of antennas with different dbm characteristics and the radio wattage adjustments in the 1200 mean he could keep himself entertained for days. He's going to spend a grand in fuel just taking off, landing, adjusting, and taking off again. Spend it on a device that does the job better instead of going for the cheap shit.
This Cringely, is he the guy on PBS? He doesn't seem real bright.
...you've never played with a flight simulator. They'll show you that 99% of flight time consists of just sitting there, waiting for the plane to get where you're going, not touching any controls at all.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
war flying!