I used to work for a company named Johnston Technical Services. JTS had a sister company (same owner) named Spreadnet. This was in 1993 or so. They built units, initially for banks, that did just this kind of thing. They used a radio card (can't remember the name) and a passive backplane in an industrial case, with custom antennae, a 286 card to drive it, a floppy drive and flash RAM to store the code and some neat custom management software. The unit used spread spectrum, and everything was encrypted (RSA?) at the base unit so that you couldn't eavesdrop by reading the emissions from the outside cable. (This was built originally for banks.)
The problem is that they could not get to a production version, because the engineer would not stop fiddling with it. In the process, the owner nearly bankrupted JTS, which is why I left the company actually. Shame, though, since those units would have been nearly costless by now.
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Apparently in America you can patent human DNA, so this is really a pretty minor thing to trademark.
I used to work for a company named Johnston Technical Services. JTS had a sister company (same owner) named Spreadnet. This was in 1993 or so. They built units, initially for banks, that did just this kind of thing. They used a radio card (can't remember the name) and a passive backplane in an industrial case, with custom antennae, a 286 card to drive it, a floppy drive and flash RAM to store the code and some neat custom management software. The unit used spread spectrum, and everything was encrypted (RSA?) at the base unit so that you couldn't eavesdrop by reading the emissions from the outside cable. (This was built originally for banks.)
The problem is that they could not get to a production version, because the engineer would not stop fiddling with it. In the process, the owner nearly bankrupted JTS, which is why I left the company actually. Shame, though, since those units would have been nearly costless by now.