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.

Comments

Re:Why do we even need the Internet?

[YankeeInExile]

If you could live with a shared media with a peak throughput of 115 kbits, sure.

I do not want to rain on anyones parade, but ISM band FHSS FSK modems are kinda cool-for-1997 ...

That being said, if maxstream had a reasonable price for onesey twoseys, (Their web site has a promotion for what appears to be this series at USD 90 for qty ten) there could be some cool hack value for moderately low speed stuff in portable projects.

Re:Speed: defense of 9600 baud

[G4from128k]

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.