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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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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!
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.
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"
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.
Seriously all companies (and governments) turn out the same eventually. Just like with google, we'll be sitting around one day commenting "Remember when slashdot was that indie little "news for nerds" site?
I boycott signatures
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
is the world flat?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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.
...they didn't use "line of cite"
Mr. Anonymous Coward... Let me take this opportunity to introduce you to Mr. Inverse-square Law.
Don't be cynical. I can look out my office window and see a mountain which is 65 miles away from here. The world is not a "totally flat plain or ocean."
Do you live in the Midwest or something? The entire world isn't all like that, you know!
Geekdom is becoming more and more mainstream every day. Ask a 16 year old about *Insert what used to be something only us computer geeks knew about*. Look about the number of registered /.'ers. It keep growing and fast. You know how many people I've turned on to /., many of them arent' even tech savy. They still check it everyday, and each month a higher percentage of the articles peak their interest, slowly but surely they start learning and the articles mean more to them. Before you know it they ask me "Hey did you see that article on arstechinca last week?"!
I boycott signatures
Actually it's 40 miles in deep space, but if you've ever visited New York City? We have quite a number of buildings above 100ft. The top of my house is 100 feet from the ground, and I'm on a hill so that helps too.
Are there 999 other slashdottters who'd like to make an order with me?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
GPRS here in the States starts at around $20 a month for unmetered service. And people say we're behind the times here.....
Last I checked, Sprint was the only cheap unmetered. BTW, it's 2.5G - it's under 300k rated.
Also, I think you're wrong on what plans there are. Here's what they've got:
Sprint PCS Vision Pictures Pack
Perfect for people who have a PCS VisionSM Picture Phone.Take, upload and send an unlimited number of pictures with Sprint PCS Picture MailSM. Includes 100 SMS Text Messages and Web access.
Obviously, you need a camera phone. It's $15, and comes with $5 free downloads/month.
Sprint PCS Vision Premium Pack
Perfect for people who want to download Ringers, Games, Screen Savers and other Sprint PCS Vision Services. Includes 100 SMS Messages and Web access.
$15, $10 free dl/mo.
Sprint PCS Vision Professional Pack
Read and send personal or company email with Sprint PCS Business ConnectionSM Personal Edition. Includes Messaging, Web access and Sprint PCS Picture Mail. ( Additional $15/month for Sprint PCS Vision Smart Devices that use the Microsoft® Pocket PC Operating System.)
It's really a waste if you've got ReqWireless WebViewer ($10, but Sprint doesn't offer it, so it's not free) and webmail, but there's a reason NOT to get a Pocket PC from them - $30/mo internet (because it's got Pocket IE), and no free downloads... It's $15/mo if you've got a regular phone.
They've also got picture and video mail packages ($5/ea, video needs picture) that can be standalone (1 cent/kb w/o Vision).
It appears that if you've got $100 or more per month in regular charges, you get free Vision (I thought it was the 2000 minute plan or greater, but...) I don't know what service level, but I BELIEVE it's Pro.
Get Free & Clear America, for the love of $DEITY, if you want to roam without getting raped ($5).
Now, I just need a way to get something like the Vi660, even with an early contract renewal (I've heard enough bad reviews about the Vi600, and I know the 660 works fairly well (except signal is weaker than my 3588i)) - I HATE THIS PIECE OF NOKIA CRAP THAT ISN'T VISION COMPATIBLE (and is a piece of Nokia crap). The Sprint salesdroid (OK, so there actually was GOOD customer service IN THE STORE - senior salesdroid) said the Nokia had FCC maximum power, and didn't say the same about the Vi660.
One thing I noticed - the thing has a wireless modem and CDMA2000 1x support. The thing is a fscking 2.5G phone, and doesn't even have internet access. At least the Vi660 is free online...
I shudder to think of the size of the handset needed to hold the processing power required for the insanely complex smart routing this concept would take to realize. Not to mention the batteries!
I agree that it's a neat concept, but early experiments with WiFi meshes seem to indicate that it will have problems scaling without a lot of horsepower behind it. And that's with fixed "pads" as it were.
No relation to Happy Monkey
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.