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One-Watt Wireless Radio Modem Reaches 40 Miles
maxstreampr wrote in to plug their
radio modem. It's the size of a credit card, one watt, and can transmit 40 miles line of sight or 3000 feet indoors. Something about using the AT command set to fire off a command 40 miles through the air amuses me.
Spam for nerds. Stuff that's commercial.
makes me think of riding around in the AM radio days and going silent when going under an overpass.
+++ATH0 on a cloudy day. With a repeater.
First post ever from a radio modem
If everyone bought one of these and ran them in peer-to-peer mode, we could all dump our ISPs!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Additionally, rumor has it that this device will burn a hole in your pocket. (Thank you, I'm here all week.)
Do you like German cars?
"Site" - a location.
"Sight" - something visual.
"Line of sight" - a line along which you can see (i.e., an unobstructed line.)
"Line of site" - evidence that what you've written matters so little to you that it's not worth the effort to proofread. You don't care; why should we?
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is used with a 256-bit key, the highest encryption standard available.
The real question is, did they use Lexar programming techniques?
...40 miles line of sight... I wonder what poor longsighted kid they found to confirm this.
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
My Grandma loves all this talk of 'Wireless' again..
Using the AT command to set a fire 40 miles off? Or has it just been too long a day at work? My office has been regularly swept for mines.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
What kind of antenna did they use? "High gain" isn't all that descriptive.
-Randy
Do you mean PCMCIA-sized?
Where's the coupler?
The speeds indicated look too slow to be useful except for remote low overhead / slow data acquisition stuff.
9600 baud is pretty darn slow, even with compresion.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Lindon, Utah is sure a happening place.
Anyone notice the 9600 baud bit rate? Marc
Apparently, the editors are hedging their bets on this one: I keep hitting reload, and the submission text alternates between "line of sight" to "line of site".
Our company uses the MaxStream RS485 modems, and I can attest that they do work very well.
Wow, that's some marketing. The "40 miles" claim is when you're in deep space and using high gain antennas. Actual performance will be less than a mile. Also, in case people want to compare this with 802.11 (which is difficult because they are in different bands), a typical 802.11b card radiates 30mW, instead of the 1W these guys are apparently claiming. The data rate is nothing exceptional either, 115.2kbps (and these are 1000 bits/kb sized), which pales in comparison to 802.11g at ~55000kbps. This technology would have a much higher "wow" factor 5 years ago, but nowadays that kind of range for that kind of throughput just isn't all that new or special.
I read the internet for the articles.
Perhaps I missed it but did anyone else find a price (even in oem qtys) for this device?
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
I'd never heard of this, but after some reading: Wireless over modems it's out there, and well supported. I can see it being a less touchy solution in that it's old school analog, but 40 miles? THat's hard to believe.
CBSD
free ipod and free gmail!
And the awesome radical speed of... 9600 bauds.
You might want to share some movies with your friend... 40miles away... you'll have your 700MB downloaded in just about... 580000 secs. (not bad.. 7 days)
For what it's worth, I once used a 5 watt HF radio to contact the Canary Islands from Atlanta, GA. The signal was not strong, but we had no trouble carrying on a brief conversation. RF is pretty amazing stuff when the conditions are right.
Dilbert: okay.
Mordac: What?! No engineer gives up email so easily. Assume the position!
Dilbert (at home, to Dogbert): So, he found the modem strapped to my ankle, but he missed my wireless pen modem.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
Amateur radio operators have been doing this for years. The higher the antenna, the better. Put up a tower, say 50-60ft, put the antenna on top using good feedline and fittings, and you will get out to good distances. Better yet, take your laptop up to a mountain location, and you will be able to tx and rx for easily many times that distance. Hams do this routinely.
Is this like a prehistoric form of Bluetooth? Well he did say there is a sucker born every minute.
Am I the only one here to not know what this does? What exactly does it do? The website makes so many great claims about it, but I have no idea what it's for. Sorry for my ignorance!
I'm using one of these right now and it's gr345l;@!@*!bbg
NO CARRIER
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Our radiolinks (which are like wi-fi) were sending line-of-sight transmissions, 9600 baud, with about 3 milliwatts. I cannot remember the frequencies we used but they were in the microwave range so I'm not sure it's comparable with the radiomodems mentioned in the article using 900 MHz band. Cool stuff anyway!
No time penalty is incurred during AES encryption or decryption.
That's pretty interesting. Perhaps they meant to say that there is no additional processing overhead beyond that which is introduced by performing the full number of rounds for a 256 bit key in hardware.
It seems you still need a shared secret. I assume it isn't doing any authenticated Diffie-Hellman to establish a session key.
Sorry, it's just kind of irritating when you hear things like "security through encryption." Great. You get integrity protection and data confidentialy while the data is in trasit. There are many other opportunities for an attacker to get your data besides when it's flying around in mid-air.
I bootleg Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
40 miles alone is not impressive, HAMs talk all over the world on less than a watt (QRP) routinely, on HF bands off-course
But than I read this modem works on 900MHz, so that's quite a feat, worthy of a "Pringles can award"
* Host interface baud rates from 1200 to 230400 bps. OK no barn burner. For what it does it is impressive enough.
Looks like their web server went under a bridge.
Although 9600 could never handle today's internet and web activities, it is amazingly fast for TTY and CLI type applications. Having started with 110 baud mechanical TTY and 300 baud acoustical coupler modem on a green screen, I well remember my first experience with a 9600 baud hardwired Lear Siegler terminals -- WOW very fast.
9600 baud is good enough for modem-to-modem chat, e-mail via pine, text processing with vi or emacs, or almost any *nix command. Thinking about this reminds me of how terribly bloated everything has become with verbose formatting and styling of pages. Pictures may be worth a 1000 words, but they require 10 to 100 times the bandwidth of those words.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
A: If they say, "Something about using the AT command set to fire off a command 40 miles through the air amuses me."
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
...all those big ears: http://perso.club-internet.fr/bastien.lopes/photos .htm
m ) made you a gift: huge HUGE HUGE antennaes that can even receive the signal of your 1 watt modem 40 miles away!!! I just hope they will provide me a truck to help me borrowing them to my home...
On one hand, you have a small and efficient 1 watt wireless radio modem. It just works. Now, you wanna listen to the signal. You look around and find that the SETI antennaes are still in use, so you fell deseperate because you cannot borrow them right now...
But all those nice countries (http://www.hermetic.ch/crypto/echelon/echelon.ht
Thank you, America!
These modems have been around for years. Motorola makes one called the PRM240 that's the similar but does almost 2 watts. Although on the specs they use baud rates like 19200 & 115200 these are not throughput rates. These are serial link rates which have nothing to do with sending data over the air.
The data rate in real life is less then that of a 14.4 half-duplex modem.
This product is already old and busted. It's maximum sustained throughput is 115k.
http://www.wifi-shootout.com/
This is the new hotness, 55 MILES. I imagine it's running at atleast 1mbit.
Let's see, hmmm
... 40 miles ... 80 miles ... 120 miles ... damn you mountains!
1 Watt
2 Watts
3 Watts
4 Watts
is the world flat?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
RF module requires no configuration, offers 40-mile line-of-sight range Paul O'Shea eeProductCenter (08/24/2004 12:00 PM ET) Email This Print This MaxStream, Inc. introduces the 9XTend OEM RF Module that provides unprecedented performance in a low cost radio modem. The 9XTend is MaxStream's longest range (up to 40 miles in RF line-of-sight), low power OEM RF module. This affordable RF module is smaller than a credit card and allows for robust performance in North America, Australia and Israel. The 9XTend outputs 1-Watt (30 dBm) of conducted output power while consuming only 780 milliamps at 5-V. This makes the 9XTend one of the most efficient 1-Watt 900 MHz modems in the industry. The 9XTend can output 4 Watts radiated power allowed by the FCC. The RF module also provides security through data encryption. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is used with a 256-bit key, the highest encryption standard available. This makes the 9XTend ideal for secure applications including automated teller machines, point-of-sale terminals, and keyless/remote access systems. No time penalty is incurred during AES encryption or decryption. MaxStream also offers its Interference Immunity Technology introduced in its 9XStream modems. The hardware/software solution creates wireless systems that are immune to RF interferers such as cell phones, pages, and other wireless systems. The transceivers provide -110 dBm receiver sensitivity enabling users to receive 900 MHz transmissions up to one-half mile in urban environments, as well as 15 miles line-of-sight, and 40 miles with high-gain antennas. Data throughput of the module is 230 kbps and has a high sustainable data streaming rate 115.2 kbps. The company offers a 9XTend Development Kit that lets users communicate wirelessly in a matter of minutes. For many modes of operation, including networking nodes, no configuration is necessary. Advanced networking features allow for easy configuration of transparent peer-to-peer, point-to-point, point-to-multipoint and multi-drop network topologies. Range specs summary * Up to 40 mile range (RF line-of-sight, @9600 RF data rate) * Up to 3000 feet range (Indoor/Urban environments, @9600 RF data rate) * 1 Watt Power Output (1 mW -- 1 W, software selectable) * -110 dBm Receiver Sensitivity (@ 9600 baud) * -103 dBm Receiver Sensitivity (@ 115200 baud) Advanced Networking and Security * True Peer-to-Peer (no "master" required), Point-to-Point and Point-to-Multipoint * Retries and Acknowledgements * 10 hopping channels each with over 65,000 network addresses available * AES Encryption (Highest Encryption Standard Available) Ease of Use * Standard AT commands and fast binary commands for changing parameters * Native RS485/422 (multi-drop bus) protocol support * Multiple low power modes including shutdown pin, cyclic sleep and serial port sleep for current consumption as low as 1 A * Host interface baud rates from 1200 to 230400 bps * Signal strength register for link quality monitoring and debugging * MaxStream XII Interference Immunity * FHSS (Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum) * 2.8 to 5.5 V power supply 9XTend Modules are available with a standard MMCX or RPSMA connectors (required by the FCC for customers using SMA-type connectors). 9XTend RF module data sheet MaxStream, Inc., 355 South 520 West Suite 180, Lindon, Utah 84042. Tel: 801-765-9885
Noone writes jokes in base 13!
I have a 40 watt fm transmitter sitting right next to me and I can barely get it to go five miles, with an eight foot antenna at 60ft height. There is no way you could consistently get 40 miles on a one watt radio device.
In ham radio, there's a 1000 miles per watt award that's not particularly hard to get....I made 1842 miles per watt (Palo Alto, California to Sakhalin Island in Russia) using a data modulation called PSK-31 and a wire antenna on my roof, and just over 1000 miles per watt from San Luis Obispo, CA to Estonia using CW: 5700 miles with 4.5 watts to a 28 foot wire thrown from a second-story window into a small tree, running on a pack of AA batteries.
"The RF module also provides security through data encryption. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is used with a 256-bit key, the highest encryption standard available."
m l :-)
Lets just hope they don't XOR the password! http://slashdot.org/articles/04/09/14/1855232.sht
anyone with a high-school diploma knows this is just gibberish. give your karma to someone who deserves it!
On earth, the horizon is about 5 miles away if you are in a totally flat plain or ocean, and you're eyes are 6 feet up off the ground. Stand on top of a 100 foot tower and the horizon becomes 36 miles away. So, what planet is this 40-mile line of sight transmission designed for?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
but...but...i cant do anything without a GUI!!!
heh
do the officials in finland want their soldiers airing out the communnications info on /. ? was this post privilaged?
Next "Ask Slashdot" topic: Is wireless radio modem communication dead?
My answer: It's not dead...just looks that way when its speeds are compared to every other form of communication we use ("we" meaning geeks...not those poor souls that have to use dialup accounts).
The actual bps rate could be significantly higher the the listed baud rate which is only the physical switching speed of the unit.
Wow you've got 3G coverage! Quick prediction, surf Slashdot using that for any period of time and you'll be very broke.
I don't know what they are charging you for data but if they are in line with GPRS charges in the UK (about 3 pounds a Megabyte) you'll be very sorry about using that on the real Internet (as apposed to skinny Wap pages.)
Philip
Signatures are broken
...they didn't use "line of cite"
I'm curious. . . What's the longest FSO (laser) link that anybody's heard of, and what's the throughput on it?
I know in some areas, this isn't as true, but in my area, at least, I can wander five or ten miles, and find at least one, and quite often more, unsecured wireless APs.
Why do we need 40 mile, line of sight, ~14.4 Kbit, again? The lowest speed that most wireless connections claim to stably connect at is 1 MBit...
[I base this not on wandering my immediate vicinity, incidentally, but sitting in a car driven by one of my mates, riding around the vast majority of the counties surrounding me. There were perhaps three or four times I saw no wireless APs...and at one point, as many as 21 simultaneously! 14.4 Kbit indeed...]
It's only an insult if it's not true.
ssh over the 9.6Kbit line, and tunnel IMAP. Works rather nicely on my GSM phone.
-- Soruk
+++ATM2ATL3AT&W0ATO0 is far superior.
ATM2: Turn speaker on always.
ATL3: Max speaker volume.
&W0: Save these settings as default. (It will stay like this after a power cycle)
ATO0: Return to data mode instead of kicking them offline so you can watch them swear over IRC.
I'm more interested in finding out who's house they tested the "3000 feet indoors" in.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
If only we can make it do frequency hopping.. then it'd be damned fast and secure right?
Military grade wireless modem!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
9600 bps is more than enough in the industrial field; these modules are intended for medium range data exchange between unattended stations (weather monitoring, etc), not for multigigabyte filesharing among teenagers. /. and not an industrial electronics related website explains the 9600 bps omission in favor of the 40 miles eyecandy.
The PR guy at Maxstream simply wanted to get as many visits as possible to their site. Being this
I'm faimiliar with MaxStream, good company, good products. They even gave us a little student discount. Used their 9xStream in my senior design project. Great for low bandwidth/low power embedded applications and extremely easy to integrate (simple UART IIRC). Just pick your own protocol and let the radio do its magic (ie nothing but basic RF knowledge required). This makes me think about picking up that project again and seeing what the extra distance might do.
I'm not really sure why this was worthy of a slashdot article -- judging by most of the posts, people are just complaining that it's slower than 802.11*.
:-)
But that's not what it's aimed at. Look at the interface it has on the non-RF side: multidrop serial. It's designed for telemetry applications. And when you're doing telemetry, lower power usage is good (as you may be running off solar-charged batteries) and bandwidth needs are minimal - you're not going to need more than a few bytes for a current water level or similar
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Wait..did you say Finnish Army?
/. and go see a doctor. :)
Stop reading
But for a purely text application, 9600 bps is usually more than enough.
did anyone notice the address of the company? they are in the same building in Lindon, UT as SCO
A cool concept even if it was slow it would be perfect for basic stuff like instant and text messaging and P2P distribution.
Thinking about this reminds me of how terribly bloated everything has become with verbose formatting and styling of pages. Pictures may be worth a 1000 words, but they require 10 to 100 times the bandwidth of those words.
When records went from 78 rpms to 33 rpms, someone somewhere probably said, "Who needs to fit 25 minutes onto one side of a record? What a waste."
I started my computing experiences accessing BBS' over a 1200 baud modem. It was plenty fast for that purpose, and I enjoyed it immensely. However, that doesn't mean I don't appreciate watching streaming video, downloading entire songs in mere seconds, or talking over my VoIP phone.
Technology marches on, my friend. And it is better, even if our nostalgic heart thinks otherwise. A picture is worth 1000 words, and a little extra bandwidth is a small price to pay.
With one of these at home, and one in your laptop you can run around town and have a direct connect back home to check your email with no surcharges..
Been looking into using HAM packet radio for this very purpose..
Or us it in the back 40 of your yard, where wifi is too weak..
Its *plenty* fast enough for a terminal desktop session, connections to imap, etc...
It didnt mention costs.. any ideas?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Receive sensitivity is good down to -110dBm which is just fantastic for a radio that size - Cisco Aironet cards are only good down to about -95dBm.
HOWEVER
Its not magic, but its cool - 9600 baud at a cheap price with a band that has good propogation is perfect for insturmentation.
If you want 900MHz data check out Alvarion Breeze Access 900 or maybe nose around and find some 2.4GHz to 900MHz transverters
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
A friend of mine has done at least 1000+ miles on 1W with Morse code. :)
And for 9600 bps data as is the case with this modem... Child's play/old news. 9600 can be done at a range of 40 miles LOS with only 1W even if you use FSK, which is by no means an efficient modulation scheme.
And I mean decade-old news when I say old, if not more...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
...and is also 4 times faster than what was common when I started using dialup Internet access. Yes, I regularly used 2400, and then shortly after 9600, 19200 and 28800 then finally 33000 or so.. to hook up my Linux 0.99 system to teh Intarweb
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Not this brand, but an IBM "options" wireless connector dealie I bought in a junk shop. 900 mghz yadayada. I never tried it out! Forgot all about it until I read this thread. See, sometimes the articles ARE useful! So I just went and dug it out, and hooked it up. It appears to be functional, at least across the room so far. The batteries last long enough to dial out, then it goes flat. I'll charge it up overnight and give it a try again in the morning see if it works. Hmm, too bad laptops don't have accessory DC OUT plug......... the thing looks to take 4 AAs in a recharge pack... hmmmm doable with a DC voltage perverter off a 12 volt.... hmmm.. LAWN MOWING SURFING!
heh heh heh
---zogger
Being someone who actually works in the radio industry, there's more uses for a radio modem than hooking it up to a computer. And 802.11 isn't a magical solution you can use for them. i.e. Courier companies use radio networks for GPS tracking, as do Shires for tracking their garbage trucks for vehicle logging. A modem like this isn't new (except maybe it's size) but it's a tool to use when other tools don't work.
They've got great modems...60 miles line of sight. Uses frequency hopping.
I do wish they would standardise on frequency allocations worldwide, as I live in the UK and might have a use for one of these, as it might be cheaper than what we have, the 458MHz band where things like this have been around for a long time, similar power, same baud rate, similar range with a directional antenna. I note that this one seems to be specified with a 4dB external antenna gain. Now that would be about a 4 element yagi, or a helix or dish, but maybe more as you would have a lot of attenuation in the coax unless it was very short, so the whole package is actually not so small as it seems.
But we have seen better than this on Slashdot, not so many weeks ago someone had fitted up dish antennae to a standard WiFi card IIRC, and were getting better range on less power (100mW?), and very much greater bandwidth, but of course very directional. That too ought to be allowed worldwide but probably is not.
This thing is not by any means a technical breakthrough, except possibly in terms of power efficiency, and even there I think the improvement is marginal.
Yep, it can be done. In '97 I used FreeWave Modems to communicate with my high-altitude balloon experiment at 115.2Kbaud from a distance of fifty-five miles. This was done using +3dB gain omnidirectional antennas on both the balloon and chase vehicle.
Take a quick surf over to Ebay and pick up several of the old Metricom Ricochet modems. With the USB connected GS series, a few kernel/net-tools patches, and external antennas you can setup a nice little peer to peer ad-hoc network. The radios will network without additional config and the datarates are 128K+ with the USB connection.
They go for anywhere from $1 for the PCMCIA cards to $5-10 for the GS versions. Lots cheaper a very hacker/experimenter friendly.
Not exactly bleeding edge technology. Amateur Radio operators have been doing this for over 20 years. It's called packet radio. Low cost packet radio networks span hundreds of miles. http://www.tapr.org/tapr/html/pktf.html
They use things like this to communicate to remote nodes (electrical substations, pipelines, oil/gas wells) in the energy industry infrastructure. Legacy communication channels may not be encrypted. The data volume doesn't require high bandwidth, but a cheap encrypted channel is good news to the industry.
Microhard Systems up in Alberta, Canada has been doing ultra small 1W Radios for some time now.
We have been using their CompactRF Modules here for at least 2 years. I live in very a mountainous area, so I the largest line of sight I have been able to see work at 1W with unity gain antennas was about 10km.
I have had it working through about 3 km of dense Vancouver, BC - At ground level, again with bland unity gain antennas..
Time travel is possible. We are quickly heading for 1984.
Burk Technology used to market a 900 meg unlicensed 1 watt duplex tranceiver with a 115.2k max throughput. Using two five element yagis and 100 feet of 9913 coax on each end (an FCC Part 15 approved package sold by Burk), I ran a 100% reliable line of sight data link between two mountain tops 28 miles apart. Actually, I was able to lower the power down to 100 Mw (.1 watt) before the link started to fade. All in all, a cheap solution to control an FM transmitter atop a mountain where no phone service was available.
either you're an idiot for not knowing what he meant, or a prick for thinking you have to point it out. i sincerely hope it's the latter.
with that said, you're not alone in your prick-ness. too many loyal slashdotters do this, and it needs to stop. so, readers, join me in letting out a hearty "shut up and read the article!"
And that's at range too, at closer it should be faster:
The transceivers provide -110 dBm receiver sensitivity enabling users to receive 900 MHz transmissions up to one-half mile in urban environments, as well as 15 miles line-of-sight, and 40 miles with high-gain antennas. Data throughput of the module is 230 kbps and has a high sustainable data streaming rate 115.2 kbps.
And people wonder why sperm counts have been dropping recently. Nuff said! :)
You fucking failed it! You failed it so horribly you'll have no choice but to go shoot yourself. Please don't make a mess.
Actually it's quite a large price to pay. You checked the price of GPRS recently? ;-)
Technology may march on, but older technology and older standards may still be useful for stuff. Your car engine is currently being controlled by a computer running at, max, 40MHz (if you're very lucky, it may even have 32-bit floating-point support). If you phone someone in Africa, chances are that your call will be going via exchanges using ancient technology - but chances are that the call will still go through. The ballpoint pen you're scribbling with is 66-year-old tech.
In this case, the main use will be for reading back diagnostics for equipment in the field. No diagnostics program will have a serious need for bandwidth, so this modem is just fine.
Grab.
not about FP. or about 40 mile range of a 1 watt radio. Ever read "Kon-Tiki" by Thor Heyerdahl? In 1947, an 8 watt radio from Norway cuold be heard in the South Pacific... 40 miles ... woohoo ...
If it weren't for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no songs.
I personally find it fascinating that the radios also provide frequency hopping. From what i read on their website, their modems transmit using FSK modulation while hopping among 25 unique frequencies in a pseudo-random sequence.
The proprietary frequency hopping modulation and the number of networks and addresses can make it very difficult for an outsider to eavesdrop on a communication. Only another maxstream radio configured with the proper channel and radio address could listen in on the communication.
But for that scenario, they offer unique vendor id numbers to customers to be programmed into the radios bought by a customer. that way radios with only that specific number programmed into the firmware will be able to communicate.
I see the only way someone could hack this is by very sophisticated, expensive equipment to be able to record and analyze all frequencies. and later put together the transmission.
With this frequency hopping combined with 256-bit AES encryption make it the most secure way to send data through the air?
Give me a break!
Ricochet modems could connect from the Golden Gate bridge to the wired APs across the bay at UC Berkley at a better data rate then this modem, and that was just using the "rambo" +5dB gain antenna. The 2nd gen ricochets also could do 128-bit RC4 encryption with little loss of effective transmitted data rate.
And why oh why is Slashdot now the website of PR champions everywhere? It seems like every 3rd submission is a damn advertisement now. WTF? I want moderation for story submissions, seriously. Like RIGHT NOW.
Canopy, the company that owns SCO, also owns the company that makes this product. Canopy companies play all kinds of games with shifting assets and board members. They act more like one company, except they get to take advantage of corporate loopholes. I would not be surprised if this thing did burn a hole in your pocket, or maybe attack the nearest Linux installation with an EMF pulse ;)