Hate to be a "been there... done that" type but my Nikon Coolpix 950 has done that for years. If a GPS putting out NMEA is attached to the serial port it places that last lat/lon/alt in the EXIF data.
Pick up a Senao (Engenius Tech) access point... Not only are they 200mw they also have an incredibly low receive threshold.
Place it near outside wall on the middle floor of the house and voila! Unless the house is heavy brick with rebar you'll get at least some leakage into the yard. If you need more in a certain spot place the AP with a view out the window in that direction.
Or heck... for 50$ a piece you can get 2 APs and place one on each end of the house (vary floors for better floor coverage)
And the FCC rules do not apply when you are the "provider" which in this case the students would be...
Q: What are "fixed wireless signals"?
A: "Fixed wireless signals" are any commercial non-broadcast communications signals transmitted via wireless technology to and/or from a fixed customer location. Examples include wireless signals used to provide telephone service or high-speed Internet access to a fixed location. This definition does not include, among other things, AM/FM radio, amateur ("HAM") radio, Citizens Band ("CB") radio, and Digital Audio Radio Services ("DARS") signals.
Q: Does the rule apply to hub or relay antennas?
A: The rule applies to "customer-end antennas" which are antennas placed at a customer location for the purpose of providing service to customers at that location. The rule does not cover antennas used to transmit signals to and/or receive signals from multiple customer locations.
Store owners can't discriminate... that is why they can not restrict seeing eye dogs... its a law to prevent discrimination. If you bring a camera into a store though they have every right to ask you to stop using it or leave... you are not discriminating against their person.
The FCC guidelines apply to antennas for reception of service ONLY! Placing a wireless AP in a dorm room is not an antenna for reception of service it is expressly for PROVIDING service.
The FCC would help them out here if the school was saying you can't have a client gateway to catch Joe Blows signal accross the highway... but as soon as they are the "provider" of the service the FCC is hands off.
Q: What are "fixed wireless signals"?
A: "Fixed wireless signals" are any commercial non-broadcast communications signals transmitted via wireless technology to and/or from a fixed customer location. Examples include wireless signals used to provide telephone service or high-speed Internet access to a fixed location. This definition does not include, among other things, AM/FM radio, amateur ("HAM") radio, Citizens Band ("CB") radio, and Digital Audio Radio Services ("DARS") signals.
Ummm... how many dorms actually have you sign a lease? But anyways...
Your argument on cops is also flawed... A cop can legally pull you over for doing above 55 mph (or the posted limit if there is one) on private land (aka a parking lot at the mall or such). A cop can give you a ticket for parking in a handicap parking space on private property... etc.. etc.. etc...
They are totally within their rights to require you to not use a device while on their property. If you are not on their property and your signal is bleeding on to their property there is nothing they can do... but they can require whatever they want when you are on their property.
A good example of this is that is is common now to have drinking and smoking prohibited in student housing. They can not say that you can not drink... but they can say if you do it here we will ask you to either leave and never trespass again or face other consequences.
Of course they can say what you can and can not do. It's not illegal or regulated by any government body when you take a camera into a store but you are on their property and they can ask you to leave for doing it.
A university can not punish/restrict you for who you are (race... religion... etc) but they can restrict you for anyything you do that doesn't infringe those areas.
The university can't control your use of the spectrum... but they can sure control the use of their property. It would be fairly hard to graduate from a university that you were never allowed on campus again.
With your reasoning the University would not be able to require parking stickers because the cops don't. They are after all the governing body for all things traffic related.
ASE and such are great... Personal SQLAnywhere is what we often get with these applications... which that is just a kick in the crotch from the vendors. 8 users and wham you get hit with having to buy a bigger DB from them (like ASE).
A good chunk of these apps use SQLAnywhere 5.x and do not provide an upgrade path because they used to many table items that are reserved words in later versions.
In summary.. ASE is fairly nice... SQLAnywhere is a joke...:}
Ah yes... but what if you are stuck on an application that you don't have access to the codebase? With this "most" ms-sql or Sybase SQLAnywhere applications can simply be told where the new datastore is and work.
We hae several POS and ERP applications on our campus that have been locked into MS-SQL or SQLAnywhere (bleh!). Yesterday after downloading sybase and getting it installed I was able to transfer and fire up test instances of 7 of the 9 applications without ever needing to ask the company that wrote it to make any changes for me.
Would I prefer these apps be FOSS... YES! We are slowly writing new versions as we get time... but it takes time and this gives us a way to save money now.
I shifted the argument because when you use a per-capita argument you have to take into the fact that not only would the coverage and service be good but it would also have to be uniform.
Right now the best connection I can get at my house is 128k ISDN (I could go frac T1 but that starts at 950$/month). Whereas people the same distance from a "town" in the next county over get 3MB/s ADSL or can opt for cable modem. Why the discrepency? The county border is the border of SBC and Comcast's area.
Everyone in my county has thus "drug down the average" for everyone else.
That is why we are going to need at least a conglomeration of companies getting together in a single effort to catch up.
In Sweden you have a prayer of a single company being able to cover the entire country with service. In the US even the largest companies have given up on that idea.
Not too mention that if one did succeed they would probably set off every monopoly alarm at the SEC. Until a single company or a concerted effort by several companies in a group takes place we will NEVER beat countries that a single company with a dream can get 80+% coverage.
Population centers might get coverage... but when such a large chunk of your population is "rural" that "last mile" turns into the "last 15 miles" and companies get squeemish because they don't see as easy of money in it.
But in Sweden 1 company can have a dream of covering the country in service and actually succeed in doing it. Even cell companies in the US have given up on that idea.
Almost every other country we hear about doing this has one distinct advantage over the US. That advantage is that they have WAY less land mass to cover.
For example... If you took all the wiring and fiber placed in Sweden to get the infrastructure they have and used it in the US you could probably only outfit New York and Chicago before running out of material.
We suffer from the fact that as a nation we are a LARGE area to cover. Cell providers have figured this out. In iceland they can easily cover the whole country with a modest number of towers. Here in Michigan we have to have the same number of towers to cover the lower peninsula. Getting fiber between major cities in Sweden you are talking 150-250 miles while in the US you are talking 400-900 miles for the same setup.
Tech scales well... but money doesn't and we are a large country to scale to. When we hear about China or Russia beating us on broadband availability then we seriously have to wonder what is going on.
"heck, you can even charter a private plane without getting your ID checked"
You obviously havn't chartered a plane lately. The charter companies are even more into knowing exactly who is going to be on the plane. Something about insurance...
The only way to fly without filing some form of an identity manifest is either in small private plane with a pilot you are buddies with... or to own the plane outright.
There is NOTHING about this that is any more permissive than a normal business with a digital PBX can already do...
"The FCC would never tolerate an old-line phone company selling a service that lets people lie to caller ID"
It is done CONSTANTLY! Marketing companies send out the callerid of the companies they are calling on behalf of... Companies have multiple phone lines send out the callerid of their main phone line.... it is a normal business service.
As for getting the number of the remote caller, anyone with a PRI line can do that. This is mandated because otherwise on 1-8XX lines you would never be able to verify you were being correctly billed for their usage from your provider.
I hate to say this... but you obviously havn't worked with a real phone system before.
No... xpro is crud. Get the source for IAXComm... it's there... only took my about 30 minutes to get it compiled for and running on my iPaq under linux.
Actually... no... I do live in a semi rural area so this is not going to be a statement that would apply in a city but... I have documented only 4 hours in the last 2 years that my wireless connection has been down (I keep rrd statistics on the link). During every one of these times there was HEAVY thundershowers.
Four hours in 2 years is actually beating my telco on reliability by a VERY large factor. If I ever have a problem I just turn to my Nextel phone. If those are both out then I should probably be in the basement getting ready for the tornado anyways.:}
I would also suggest not using Cisco, Linksys or DLink gear. Senao are the best cards in transmit and receive by a large margin. They are fairly immune to microwaves and the occasional Panasonic Gigarange user. (Evil bastards!):}
My main phone line comes over a 6.1 mile 802.11b link. I use Asterisk PBX with the IAX protocol to bridge the calls.
And my Grandstream SIP phone works great attached to a Linksys WET-11 client bridge.
And my Ipaq runs IAXComm
just fine over it's wireless card to use as a netphone.
Does the battery life suck... yes... does it work and show promise... YES!
Just because people have problems with these cheap (as in quality)(usually SIP or H.323 based) piece of crud phones doesn't mean the technology and possibilities are not still there. SIP is VERY prone to problems from NAT (which many wireless networks use of course).
Anyways... for my 2 cents though I say... just give it time.
But zap2it.com is catching on and just added XML data downloads to their labs. They call it datadirect or some such nonsense. No more parsing hundreds of webpages for the listings. You just get a nice XML download. Mythtv already supports it great.
Check it out yourself at http://labs.zap2it.com.
MythTV has a code to use for signup in their setup documents and with that and a short survey you are in business.
The device is putting out the radiation... No matter antenna you put on it you don't increase the output of the device. Now you do focus it into a much "hotter" spot when you make it directional. Even so though none of these devices are allowed to excede 1W of effective radiated power (No commercial consumer device currently excedes 250mw).
To give you an example... You microwave uses 4000 times that much power to cook food with.
I would imagine if you stood in the beam path of a 20+db antenna for a couple months you would have health issues... but you also wouldn't have a signal:}
As health risks go a cell phone is a MUCH larger output of power and you stick it right next to your head. Worry about those first:}
And FWIW cantennas are no better... most directional antennas send most of their power out the front but all of them have sidelobes.
Slashdot Mirror
He must be German!
:})
(Excuse the SNL moment
Hate to be a "been there... done that" type but my Nikon Coolpix 950 has done that for years. If a GPS putting out NMEA is attached to the serial port it places that last lat/lon/alt in the EXIF data.
:}
Works great... and has for several years
Just please don't let them change it to Firemoth or Thundercat!
Pick up a Senao (Engenius Tech) access point... Not only are they 200mw they also have an incredibly low receive threshold.
Place it near outside wall on the middle floor of the house and voila! Unless the house is heavy brick with rebar you'll get at least some leakage into the yard. If you need more in a certain spot place the AP with a view out the window in that direction.
Or heck... for 50$ a piece you can get 2 APs and place one on each end of the house (vary floors for better floor coverage)
From: http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/otard.html
The FCC guidelines apply to antennas for reception of service ONLY! Placing a wireless AP in a dorm room is not an antenna for reception of service it is expressly for PROVIDING service.
The FCC would help them out here if the school was saying you can't have a client gateway to catch Joe Blows signal accross the highway... but as soon as they are the "provider" of the service the FCC is hands off.
Ummm... how many dorms actually have you sign a lease? But anyways...
Your argument on cops is also flawed... A cop can legally pull you over for doing above 55 mph (or the posted limit if there is one) on private land (aka a parking lot at the mall or such). A cop can give you a ticket for parking in a handicap parking space on private property... etc.. etc.. etc...
They are totally within their rights to require you to not use a device while on their property. If you are not on their property and your signal is bleeding on to their property there is nothing they can do... but they can require whatever they want when you are on their property.
A good example of this is that is is common now to have drinking and smoking prohibited in student housing. They can not say that you can not drink... but they can say if you do it here we will ask you to either leave and never trespass again or face other consequences.
Hogwash...
Of course they can say what you can and can not do. It's not illegal or regulated by any government body when you take a camera into a store but you are on their property and they can ask you to leave for doing it.
A university can not punish/restrict you for who you are (race... religion... etc) but they can restrict you for anyything you do that doesn't infringe those areas.
The university can't control your use of the spectrum... but they can sure control the use of their property. It would be fairly hard to graduate from a university that you were never allowed on campus again.
With your reasoning the University would not be able to require parking stickers because the cops don't. They are after all the governing body for all things traffic related.
ASE and such are great... Personal SQLAnywhere is what we often get with these applications... which that is just a kick in the crotch from the vendors. 8 users and wham you get hit with having to buy a bigger DB from them (like ASE).
:}
A good chunk of these apps use SQLAnywhere 5.x and do not provide an upgrade path because they used to many table items that are reserved words in later versions.
In summary.. ASE is fairly nice... SQLAnywhere is a joke...
Ah yes... but what if you are stuck on an application that you don't have access to the codebase? With this "most" ms-sql or Sybase SQLAnywhere applications can simply be told where the new datastore is and work.
We hae several POS and ERP applications on our campus that have been locked into MS-SQL or SQLAnywhere (bleh!). Yesterday after downloading sybase and getting it installed I was able to transfer and fire up test instances of 7 of the 9 applications without ever needing to ask the company that wrote it to make any changes for me.
Would I prefer these apps be FOSS... YES! We are slowly writing new versions as we get time... but it takes time and this gives us a way to save money now.
I shifted the argument because when you use a per-capita argument you have to take into the fact that not only would the coverage and service be good but it would also have to be uniform.
Right now the best connection I can get at my house is 128k ISDN (I could go frac T1 but that starts at 950$/month). Whereas people the same distance from a "town" in the next county over get 3MB/s ADSL or can opt for cable modem. Why the discrepency? The county border is the border of SBC and Comcast's area.
Everyone in my county has thus "drug down the average" for everyone else.
That is why we are going to need at least a conglomeration of companies getting together in a single effort to catch up.
As I replied to a reply above...
In Sweden you have a prayer of a single company being able to cover the entire country with service. In the US even the largest companies have given up on that idea.
Not too mention that if one did succeed they would probably set off every monopoly alarm at the SEC. Until a single company or a concerted effort by several companies in a group takes place we will NEVER beat countries that a single company with a dream can get 80+% coverage.
Population centers might get coverage... but when such a large chunk of your population is "rural" that "last mile" turns into the "last 15 miles" and companies get squeemish because they don't see as easy of money in it.
Canada has an advantage in that 90% of their population lives in concentrated areas.
You ever notice on the "night lights" satellite pics that almost all the light in Canada is dead smack on the US border?
Ahhh young grasshapper...
True...
But in Sweden 1 company can have a dream of covering the country in service and actually succeed in doing it. Even cell companies in the US have given up on that idea.
Almost every other country we hear about doing this has one distinct advantage over the US. That advantage is that they have WAY less land mass to cover.
For example... If you took all the wiring and fiber placed in Sweden to get the infrastructure they have and used it in the US you could probably only outfit New York and Chicago before running out of material.
We suffer from the fact that as a nation we are a LARGE area to cover. Cell providers have figured this out. In iceland they can easily cover the whole country with a modest number of towers. Here in Michigan we have to have the same number of towers to cover the lower peninsula. Getting fiber between major cities in Sweden you are talking 150-250 miles while in the US you are talking 400-900 miles for the same setup.
Tech scales well... but money doesn't and we are a large country to scale to. When we hear about China or Russia beating us on broadband availability then we seriously have to wonder what is going on.
Umm... stick it in your ear! :} Sorry couldn't resist.
"heck, you can even charter a private plane without getting your ID checked"
You obviously havn't chartered a plane lately. The charter companies are even more into knowing exactly who is going to be on the plane. Something about insurance...
The only way to fly without filing some form of an identity manifest is either in small private plane with a pilot you are buddies with... or to own the plane outright.
There is NOTHING about this that is any more permissive than a normal business with a digital PBX can already do...
"The FCC would never tolerate an old-line phone company selling a service that lets people lie to caller ID"
It is done CONSTANTLY! Marketing companies send out the callerid of the companies they are calling on behalf of... Companies have multiple phone lines send out the callerid of their main phone line.... it is a normal business service.
As for getting the number of the remote caller, anyone with a PRI line can do that. This is mandated because otherwise on 1-8XX lines you would never be able to verify you were being correctly billed for their usage from your provider.
I hate to say this... but you obviously havn't worked with a real phone system before.
Sure does present a MASSIVE conflict of interest issue. Let's see... a monopoly... selling stuff to guard their own product from defects.
Reminds me of the Dilbert with the bonus for finding bugs and the comment is "I'm gonna write myself a minivan!"
Is this a little like:
"Dr Kevorkian... Heal thyself"?
No... xpro is crud. Get the source for IAXComm... it's there... only took my about 30 minutes to get it compiled for and running on my iPaq under linux.
Actually... no... I do live in a semi rural area so this is not going to be a statement that would apply in a city but... I have documented only 4 hours in the last 2 years that my wireless connection has been down (I keep rrd statistics on the link). During every one of these times there was HEAVY thundershowers.
:}
:}
Four hours in 2 years is actually beating my telco on reliability by a VERY large factor. If I ever have a problem I just turn to my Nextel phone. If those are both out then I should probably be in the basement getting ready for the tornado anyways.
I would also suggest not using Cisco, Linksys or DLink gear. Senao are the best cards in transmit and receive by a large margin. They are fairly immune to microwaves and the occasional Panasonic Gigarange user. (Evil bastards!)
My main phone line comes over a 6.1 mile 802.11b link. I use Asterisk PBX with the IAX protocol to bridge the calls.
And my Grandstream SIP phone works great attached to a Linksys WET-11 client bridge.
And my Ipaq runs IAXComm just fine over it's wireless card to use as a netphone.
Does the battery life suck... yes... does it work and show promise... YES!
Just because people have problems with these cheap (as in quality)(usually SIP or H.323 based) piece of crud phones doesn't mean the technology and possibilities are not still there. SIP is VERY prone to problems from NAT (which many wireless networks use of course).
Anyways... for my 2 cents though I say... just give it time.
Ahhh yes young grasshopper....
But zap2it.com is catching on and just added XML data downloads to their labs. They call it datadirect or some such nonsense. No more parsing hundreds of webpages for the listings. You just get a nice XML download. Mythtv already supports it great.
Check it out yourself at http://labs.zap2it.com.
MythTV has a code to use for signup in their setup documents and with that and a short survey you are in business.
The device is putting out the radiation... No matter antenna you put on it you don't increase the output of the device. Now you do focus it into a much "hotter" spot when you make it directional. Even so though none of these devices are allowed to excede 1W of effective radiated power (No commercial consumer device currently excedes 250mw).
:}
:}
To give you an example... You microwave uses 4000 times that much power to cook food with.
I would imagine if you stood in the beam path of a 20+db antenna for a couple months you would have health issues... but you also wouldn't have a signal
As health risks go a cell phone is a MUCH larger output of power and you stick it right next to your head. Worry about those first
And FWIW cantennas are no better... most directional antennas send most of their power out the front but all of them have sidelobes.