I have serious doubts that moonbounce could be made to work at anything like a usable bandwidth.
Depends on how you define `usable'. Even 10 bps would be `useful' to some. But certainly, WiFi bounced off the moon would be very difficult, especially with only 0.250 watts. (The VHF moonbounce guys often use a full 1500 watts and high gain antennas, just to bounce some CW off the moon, and even that doesn't always work.)
But I do suspect you could do CW at 2.4 GHz easily enough. The larger frequency would mean your antennas could be much smaller, or give higher gains, or some combination of the two. The only real issue would be how reflective the moon is to 2.4 GHz signals.
suspect whoever is doing this will need a calculator good for more digits in internal accuracy to be able to get reliable figures than my TI-51 which only does 13 + 2 IIRC.
I suspect you're right -- it'll be next to impossible. However, I'm not sure why you'd need a lot of signifigant figures on your calculator. Merely adding dB loss figures can usually be done in your head.
Looking it up, the round trip path loss starts around 242 dB and goes up from there.
Also, when dealing with large or small numbers in your calculator, you don't always need lots of signifigant digits. What you need is something that can keep track of the mantissa and the exponent seperately. For example, 3e56 only has one sigifigant digit, but you know it's 3 followed by 56 zeros. If your calculator doesn't understand scientific notation at all, you can keep track of the exponents in your head or on paper, and just let the calculator calculate mantissas.
Your right about iding every 10 minutes, but CW and phoen are usually the only modes I know that you have to be aware of it.
Aware of it or not, it has to be done on all modes except for telecommand. For TV (SS or FS) one often transmits a frame with their callsign. (For FSTV, often one holds up a card with their callsign every few minutes:) For PSK31 one types it out like they would with CW. For packet, yes, your TNC includes it for you, but it's certainly there.
IF every transmission is attacthed to YOUR BSSID you are ID'ing EVERY time you transmit a packet!
Isn't that what I said, but in a way that's not quite as clear?
I know of NO malfunction of transmitting equipment that will increase ERP.
I've already mentioned one. Do you really need more? Anything that increases the gain on your final amplifier will increase your output power, and therefore probably your ERP. (It'll probably also increase the distortion of your signal, but that's another matter.)
For example, the gain of an op-amp is usually determined by the ratio of the feedback resistor to the series input resistor. If a bad solder joint or a drop of sweat gets into the circuit board and adjusts this ratio, the output power will be adjusted -- possibly down, possibly up. It depends on what exactly was adjusted. And if the new power isn't too much higher, it may not even fry something.
It's not worth arguing about, but my original point still stands.
Posessing a ham license IS enough because as a licensed operator, you ARE obviously required to follow the rules else you will lose your license.
Not all hams follow the rules. Some don't follow the rules, and eventually get smacked down by the FCC and often lose their licenses.
Merely having the license is NOT enough. You have to follow the rules, and that's NOT a given.
Things DO malfunction and in those cases it usually does not INCREASE ERP.
If the resistor you're using to limit output power in your transmitter shorts out, you may very well INCREASE ERP. I didn't say that only the antenna could malfunction.
This shows you don't know anything about antennas.
Or it shows that you're not very imaginative about how things can malfunction. My point was that your antenna cannot guarantee that you stay udner [sic] the FCC's regulated ERP rules as you claimed.
That is CORRECT. You are REQUIRED to ID every 10 minutes....if it's a VOICE or CW transmission.
The only way you can transmit under the ham rules and not ID yourself every 10 minutes is if you're doing telecommand -- R/C, radio control. In that case, you're supposed to put your call sign on the transmitter instead. (And indeed, my 50 mHz module for my Futaba 9C has a sticker with AD5RH on it.)
Using your name in the Base Station ID (and not hiding it) is usually adequate.
Assuming that you meant callsign instead of name, of course. In that case, you are IDing yourself at least every 10 minutes, are you not? (Unless you don't even transmit, of course.)
As for hiding it, every WiFi packet has your SSID right there in cleartext. Even if you're using WEP (which would not be allowed under the ham rules.) Cloaking merely removes the SSID from beacon packets (but it's still there if data is transmitted) and turning off beacon packets (data packets still have it, of course.)
My point was that merely possessing a ham license is not enough -- you have to follow all the ham rules. Which is fine for trying to set a `world record', but makes it pretty impractical for many of the things that people want to use these long distance WiFi links for.
i just don't see them going through that effort just to get a couple laptops talking to each other.
I certainly do. People will do almost anything to get their name next to `new world record'. And this isn't even particularly dangerous or expensive, unlike many other things that people do in their attempts to set world records.
Of course, you did mention mountains so obviously you're aware of the concept, though to say that the curvature of the Earth can only be beat by bouncing the signal off of something isn't really right.
The only way to beat the whole "curvature of the earth" problem is to bounce the signal off something above the earth.
Really? Consider this -- why do people like to put antennas on top of tall hills, buildings and mountains?
Using a satellite, moon bounce or meteor scatter may get you further than a tall antenna, but tall antennas certainly do overcome the curvature of the Earth to a signifigant degree.
In theory you could, if you could use enough bandwidth. A WiFi signal takes up about 30 mHz so if you could use the entire band from 20 to 50 mHz, you could probably approach 11 Mb/s. (Of course, you'd have all sorts of problems, ranging from the FCC smacking you down to all sorts of antenna problems.)
If you could use 27.000 mHz to 27.999 mHz, you probably couldn't squeeze 11 mb/s out of that, but 1 mb/s should be doable. (Of course, this wouldn't be WiFi, so the entire point is moot. And of course the FCC would smack you down...)
The data transmission speed is not directly related to the frequency used. Instead, it's related to the bandwidth used. The frequency comes into play only because the higher your frequency, the more bandwidth is available (as a general rule.) One WiFi signal takes up the same bandwidth as everything from 0-30 mHz combined -- AM radio, all the ham HF bands, shortwave, Loran, CB radio, six R/C channels and lots and lots more.
I don't think ionospheric propogation is going to work at wifi frequencies.
It won't. Meteor scatter or tropospheric ducting might. Meteor scatter would certainly work, but it rarely lasts long and tends to distort the signal (which would make WiFi unusable.) I don't know if 2.4 gHz signals are subject to tropospheric ducting or not.
Moon bounce is another option, though you're going to need either a lot more power or MUCH larger antennas. But it would be cool if they could make it work -- they could do distances approaching 12,000 miles...
There is just no way they can maintain 300 miles/480km without using relay stations.
Well, obviously they did it, though the site is down so I can't actually read their article.
Multi megawatt FM stations
You're probably thinking of UHF TV stations. FM stations don't get that much power.
125/200km is about the maximum range that is possible on frequencies much higher than HF,
Under normal conditions (i.e. not much altitude), maybe. But if you can put your two antennas on top of mountains, you can get further.
This page may help you determine how far the horizon is given a certain height. (And don't forget that a nautical mile is 1.15 miles.)
If we assume that each antenna is on top of a 5,000 foot mountain, with nothing in between this gives a line of sight distance of 190 miles. If we raise the mountains to 15,000 feet, the distance becomes 320 miles (though I'm not sure that sutiable mountains even exist that are that tall, that close, and have nothing inbetween to interfere. You could use an airplane or balloon instead of a mountain, but then aiming the antenna (and even getting it up there) becomes very difficult.)
This is certainly possible, and in fact if you could find the proper location (i.e. two tall mountains with nothing in between) and even bigger antennas, you might be able to go even further.
even with captain picard's private satellite link to france they are not going to get 480km out of it.
Ok, if you're talking to a satellite this all goes out the window, because it's all line of site. In that case, it's only a matter of how good your antennas are. But yes, you can get a signal to a satellite with only a watt of power or so -- hams do it all the time. And this doesn't even require really fancy antennas if the satellite is low, like the ISS is.
If your a LICENSED Amateur Radio Operator, cantennas and this dish used for the record are legal.
Of course, it's legal for anybody to use antennas like that for receiving as well. It's not the antenna that's illegal... it's the possible use that might be illegal.
And while hams can use any antenna they want, they can only do this on the ham bands while following ham rules. In the US, this means IDing yourself every 10 minutes, no encryption, no pecuniary interest, third party traffic restrictions, etc.
Only the antenna that comes with your equipment or is designed for use with that equipment (like DESIGNED to work with it)can guarantee that you stay udner the FCC's regulated ERP rules.
Hate to burst your bubble, but 1) no antenna can guarantee this (after all, things do malfunction), and 2) there is some room for a hobbiest to legally make his own transmitters, antennas and such without a ham license and without FCC certification. Using this antenna with a standard WiFi card probably won't qualify, but it can be done.
Does podunk Police officers have the right to confiscate your equipment? NO.
Not if you're trying to break some world record like this. But they probably can if you're using your cantenna to leech off your neighbor's WiFi connection and you get caught.
(Nice use of the word `podunk' in there. It's totally irrelevant (as large police departments don't have the right either), and yet it's a nice jab at
Lozito.)
Fair enough. Obviously IE users must be under-represented as well, since IE spoofs it's UA string as well.
and adding (compatible, mybrowsername) doesn't make it any better.
Well, everybodys looks for it, so it works out just fine, even if it's not technically right.
Of course, I'm being sarcastic here. Opera and Opera users may not think they're being counted properly, but according to
this page most of the website statistics services already count them correctly, spoofed or not.
In what way is pointing out the fact that sites often fail to detect Opera because it spoofs as IE by default whining?
Opera (the company) and Opera users have often claimed that the numbers of Opera users were being drastically under-reported because of this spoofing.
And often it took the form of whining... `This report is so unfair to Opera users... there's so many more of us than your web server logs show, etc.'
Is it whining if your browser is being discriminated against, and you make a point of that?
It's whining when every time soembody attempts to count how popular each browser is, somebody has to point out how innaccurate it is because `it doesnt' count Opera users properly.' If the Opera developers wanted Opera to be counted properly, it wouldn't spoof it's user agent by default. Mozilla doesn't, Firefox doesn't, Netscape doesn't, IE doesn't...
Surely they were aware of the risk of not being counted properly when they made the decision to spoof their User agent. It was their decision, and they knew what they were doing. They need to live with the (minor, imho) consequences, or fix it (as they're finally doing, good for them.)
And as for the users, if they feel that it's important that Opera be counted properly, the first thing they need to do is make sure their own personal installations report their User agents correctly.
Were the black slaves in the US "whining" when they wanted freedom? Were those who wanted to abolish slavery "whining"? Yeah, I'm purposedly exaggerating slightly, but surely you get my point.
No, I don't get your point. Are Opera users slaves or something? What does any of this have to do with slavery?
All I'm talking about is if Opera makes up 0.2% of the browser market, or some higher percentage. To try and compare that to slavery, well, makes it look like slavery was/is a trivial issue.
Why the constant derogatory comments about Opera on Slashdot?
If you're asking me, you're asking the wrong person. I said nothing about Opera the browser. My comments were about Opera the company and Opera users, and probably only a small (but vocal) minority of those.
but then you just had to add that second paragraph to make sure that you showed everyone how you really think Opera is lame
I said no such thing. Your English comprehension skills may be lame, but I said no such thing about the Opera browser.
Of course, this assumes that it actually matters how many people use Opera, and that they be accurately counted. I suspect that it only matters for bragging rights, but I'm sure that others will say that `if enough people use Opera, we'll support it'. (Except that if they did their site correctly, it would work on any browser already.)
Opera (the company) has always whined that they weren't being properly counted because of they defaulted to pretending to be IE, so it'll be good to finally remove this whine. (Of course, they can still whine about it, as they'll say it's people using older versions, or people who have changed it manually, so maybe nothing will change.)
Huge scale website it doesn't work. Been there tried it. I even tried the coldfusion setup and it can not work under huge loads like slashdot would get or other large sites like CNN,ESPN,Etc...
So, you couldn't do it, so it can't be done?
In any event, lumpy didn't say anything about huge scale websites.
Probably a bigger limitation is that MSSQL just runs on PCs (and Windows, for that matter.) So that limits the hardware you can throw at a problem.
MSSQL+ASP can work
I'm sure it can. Just like MSSQL+perl or java can work. (Actually, you can do perl in ASP if you wish, and probably java too. ASP doesn't force you to use virtual basic... you can use other languages.)
yes mysql is a real database.. anytihng you can do in your favorite I can do in mysql
That's nice. Irrelevant to people saying that MSSQL only works with ASP, but nice.
but lumpy is right...
Sorry, but lumpy was flat-out wrong. He said
but if you are forced to use MSSQL then you are also forced to use ASP or ASP.NET unless you have months to dink around with special patches to compile into your favorite scripting languages to connect to MSSQL.
It took me about 30 minutes of googling to figure out how to talk to MSSQL from perl. (Mostly because I didn't realize that MSSQL was based on Sybase at the time, so I didn't realize that it was FreeTDS and DBD::Sybase that I needed.) Once I found that out, everything just worked. No special patches or anything.
Under java, it's even easier. Just put Opta2000.jar into your CLASSPATH, and use the correct database URL, and it all just works. (For the record, I do perl programming and not java programming, but I work with lots of people who write java programs that work with MSSQL, Oracle or DB2 with no changes beyond the database URL, and am I familiar with the basics of it.)
mssql + php = gobs of hours getting that working that could have had the site 1/2 finished by the time you got the SQL connection working.
PHP's database problem is that it doesn't abstract the database layer away from anything. If you write an application to work with MSSQL, it'll only work with MSSQL. At least this was the case last time I looked... it's been a while.
Either way, it's not MSSQL's fault. It's PHP's. An application written on a language with proper SQL support will generally work on a new database with only some very minor changes.
Any time I'm forced to defend Microsoft or one of it's products, I feel like I should be looking for the Candid Camera guys...
If you are stuck with MSSQL for your database backend then forget about anything but ASP.
Those who say something cannot be done should not interfere with those who are actually doing it.
With the right JDBC driver, java talks to MSSQL just fine. Even java running on *nix has no problems working with a MSSQL database on Windows box. It just works, and lots of `large scale websites' use java and MSSQL together.
Personally, I run perl code on my Linux box that works on a MSSQL database. It works fine too, though I've been a little frustrated that FreeTDS doesn't support placeholders yet. (But this is a limitation of FreeTDS, not MSSQL. And apparantly you can work around it by using ODBC, which I'm not going to do. But either way, it does work fine.)
Typically, "drug paraphernalia" charges are pressed only when drugs are found relatively close by, or if drug residues are suspected on the device.
If you say so.
Here in Texas, it's generally a class C misdemeanor. Just like speeding. In fact, the same form used for a speeding ticket is often used for the possession charge, and so your speeding ticket will often also tell you what the fine is for possession of drug paraphernalia.
I've never been a drug user, but from what I've heard, when a cop finds something, usually in a traffic stop, he confiscates it, and writes the ticket. I doubt the item even gets kept as evidence, let alone tested for drugs. And unless he actually finds real drugs, or there's a warrant out for the people in the car or they're drunk/high or something, he lets them go.
I imagine they could fight it in court easily enough, arguing that it was only for tobacco or for decoration, but I doubt anybody actually does that.
As for the head shops that sell bongs, the police generally leave them alone, and the shops themselves are very careful to instruct buyers on how to properly smoke tobacco with them when they sell one. (The police do occasionally get these shops for having more than six dildos, but that's another story.)
Like I said let a fuckwad cop tell me I have an illegal antenna. I'll open a can of worms on him that he will not believe. I will stand up for my rights, and I know exactly who to contact to bring maximum pressure to bear.
Good for you. Call down the fire and brimstone from above.
A better plan would be to explain that it's legal, show your ham license (though it's not required), and if he does arrest you or take the device, fight it in court if it's cost effective to do so.
You're not going to get any satisfaction over fighting with the police about it. At most you're just going to spend thousands of dollars fighting a $100 ticket that the judge would probably throw out anyways because they can't find the law you're supposedly violating.
Even the press isn't going to care. It's not like they were beating you or something. They just got confused about the law.
(Of course, one thing that people seem to have forgotten is that while you can receive whatever you want, actually using a wireless AP, if you have no reason to expect that you're welcome to use it, is generally against the law. It's probably even a felony in most places. Wardriving (i.e. just listening) is one thing, but if you're parking looking at web pages using somebody else's AP, you're probably breaking the law, and the FCC isn't going to protect you.)
In order to be charged with `posession of drug paraphernalia' it must be provable that the object in question has been used in conjunction with illegal drugs.
Sounds reasonable. Though I doubt the law would always agree with you -- remember, the law changes from state to state and often even between different cities and counties. In any event, my point is that there are laws that can make mere possession of things illegal, things that you wouldn't expect to be illegal.
And even if the law agrees with you, the police, judge and jury may not. `Honest officer, this bong, er, water pipe is only for tobacco!'
BTW in topics like this it rocks to be an amatuer radio operator. I can amplify that signal AND feed it into a high gain antenna, provided I do not cause interference to anyone else.
Actually, if you're going under the ham rules, and using the ham part of the 2.4 gHz band, it's the unlicensed users who can't interfere with you.
But the bigger issue is that you also need to follow the ham rules -- ID yourself every 10 minutes, no commercial traffic, no encryption, etc. And unless your system is smart enough to automatically limit itself to the power strictly needed, your power limit is just one watt. (But at least they will let you put your one watt into a big honking high-gain antenna.)
Let some fuckwad cop tell me I have an "illegal" antenna!
Hopefully he's got a Cops TV show camera man filming you getting your beatdown. Right or wrong, it's usually wise to be polite to the man with the badge and the gun. Calling him a fuckwad is not suggested, even if he is one. (Perhaps especially if he is one.)
Really, there's little stopping them from using any US company's patented stuff at all -- I'm sure the companies would protest, but what's the US going to do about it? Go to war? Cut off diplomatic ties? Boycott them?
But they (China) may have problems selling stuff that uses this stuff to other countries, especially countries that are more inline with the US ideas of IP. Of course, China itself is a pretty large market, so this may not be a big problem.
Doesn't the FCC make an exception for purely directional antennas like parabolics and cantennas? I believe they can be much more powerful so long as they are radiating the majority of their power in one direction.
`Purely directional' is just another way of saying high gain. Generally the unlicensed bands limit effective radiated power, so if you have an antenna that gives 10 dB of gain over an antenna that's legal but at the limit, you need to reduce your power by 10 dB to remain legal. It gets sort of complicated.
Antennas used for transmission in that range by unlicensed users are
required to be FCC approved and meet a specific criteria.
That's not entirely true. If your radio equipment uses low enough
power, you can transmit almost anywhere in the spectrum with
unlicensed equipment. For example, you could make a device that
transmits in the FM band with a few milliwatts so you could listen to
your iPod over your car radio. And you could even use a high gain
antenna on this, as long as your effective radiated power remained
below the legal limit.
(You as an experimenter could design and build such a device without
any special permission. If a company were to do it and sell it
commercially, I think they'd still need FCC certification.)
And of course, ham radio operators are licenced, and can use
transmitters in the 2.4 gHz band, up to 1500 watts (or 1 or 100 watts
if it's spread spectrum like WiFi), if they follow all the ham radio
rules.
But anybody can listen to anything they want, and can make
antennas for receiving of any sort. In fact, as long as you're only
receiving and not transmitting, I don't see how wardriving could ever
be illegal.
(I believe this even applies to listening to analog cell phone calls,
though it is illegal to make or sell equipment that can listen to
those bands. But I do believe it's still legal to listen to the
calls, as long as you don't tell anybody else what you've heard. (The
law is a bit more complicated than that, but I won't get into that
right now.))
In any case, possessing a device that you're not allowed to use isn't
a crime. Although using it may be.
Oh really? I guess you've never heard of charges like `posession of
drug paraphernalia' or anything like that? Similar things often apply
to lock picks, crowbars and wire cutters as well. I agree that these
laws are stupid (as there's already laws against having drugs and
committing burglarly) but the are the law.
But in this case, the police are nuts, and the FCC is likely to smack
them down. Only the FCC gets to police the airwaves -- they've made
this quite clear in the past.
However, for normal users, using normal power WiFi equipment,
transmitting with one of these cantennas is illegal.
Possession isn't, but transmitting is. The FCC regulations limit the
amount of power you can transmit with, and it's based either on
effective radiated power or volts/meter. Either way, any sort of
directional antenna (like a cantenna) increases these figures without
increasing the total power, and therefore exceed the FCC permitted
power (unless they reduce their transmitter power by a similar amount,
of course. Which they probably don't do.)
Honestly, what would happen if an astronaut just stuck his naked arm out from an airlock into outer space?
To comment on this again, what would happen to his had is probably going to be similar to what happened to
Joseph Kittinger's hand when the pressure seal on his glove failed at 102,000 feet. He lost the use of his hand after a short period of near vacuum, and it hurt, but it did recover once he made it back down on the ground.
More on the story here, and google will find you more if you search for his name, vacuum and hand.
I didn't mean that nitrogen was useless. I meant it's mostly unused by our bodies -- we certainly don't do much with the nitrogen in the air. (Your page does say it's valued for it's inertness, after all.)
Certainly, our bodies can do without breathing nitrogen for a while. Deep divers sometimes use breathing gases like heliox with little or no nitrogen (as it can cause the
nitrogen narcosis and the bends.)
I suggest you look up "Apollo 1" as to why that is.
Read my post again. I explicitly mentioned Apollo 1.
As I understand it, the big problem with Apollo 1 was that it had 100% oxygen... at over one atmosphere. Had they used 100% oxygen and 1/4 or so atmosphere, like used in space, the fire would not have burned out of control like that.
Space Shuttle, as an example, is 20% oxygen, 80% nitrogen, much like earth.
Looks like you're right but the
space suits certainly don't. (I guess overpressure is a much bigger issue in a space suit, which makes sense. Overpressure means you need a thicker suit, and a thicker suit (and the overpressure itself) means you have less and less flexibility. Certainly, astronauts can't do much in their space suits.)
Now, the pressure inside your arm is one atmosphere
Actually, most space ships are filled with roughly 100% oxygen, but with the parital pressure of oxygen set to the be the same as it is at sea level, so the actual pressure would be about 1/5 atmosphere. Your body would get the same amount of oxygen per breath -- what you'd be giving up is the mostly unused nitrogen, which makes up about 78% of the atmosphere down here on Earth.
(Of course, all figures quoted are approximate.)
By reducing the pressure, they reduce the stress on the craft, the effects of an explosive decompression, they don't need to carry nitrogen with them, etc.
The Apollo 1 astronauts were killed by this, sort of. During the test, the capsule was filled with 100% oxygen as is customary, but they left it at full pressure. So the partial pressure of oxygen was 5x normal, which was high enough to make velcro burn very quickly...
In any event, since we'd assume that their bodies would have acclimated to the reduced pressure, the pressure inside your arm would also be 1/5 atmosphere before you stuck it out in space.
I don't know how the body would react to going from 0.2 atmospheres to 0 atmospheres, but it would certainly be a lot less dramatic than going from 1 to 0.
I imagine that the effect would be like getting a hickey (but all over your body), at least with a 0.5 or so atmosphere difference. With a 0.2 atmosphere difference, the effect may be even smaller. I recall once giving a hickey and getting blood out, which really surprised me. But yet I didn't actually break the skin. I don't know how much of a vacuum I could create, but it wouldn't surprise me if blood and other fluids could start seeping out of somebody all over their body suddenly dropped from 1 to 0 atmospheres. Not explosive, but it could become life threatening very quickly if it happened body-wide. (Or maybe your body's pressure would quickly adjust and the blood/fluids loss would be small.)
At one point an astronaut jumps from a repair pod to an airlock without an helmet and survives just fine, which is perfectly realistic. The greatest worry is actually all the radiation that outer space is bathed in.
Actually, I'd expect the greatest dangers to be 1) lack of oxygen, and 2) if you didn't let all of the air out of your lungs first, they'd expand and could very well be damaged by the difference in pressure. Radiation is indeed a danger, but unless it's extremely severe, it won't kill you in minutes, like lack of oxygen can.
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But I do suspect you could do CW at 2.4 GHz easily enough. The larger frequency would mean your antennas could be much smaller, or give higher gains, or some combination of the two. The only real issue would be how reflective the moon is to 2.4 GHz signals.
I suspect you're right -- it'll be next to impossible. However, I'm not sure why you'd need a lot of signifigant figures on your calculator. Merely adding dB loss figures can usually be done in your head.Looking it up, the round trip path loss starts around 242 dB and goes up from there.
Also, when dealing with large or small numbers in your calculator, you don't always need lots of signifigant digits. What you need is something that can keep track of the mantissa and the exponent seperately. For example, 3e56 only has one sigifigant digit, but you know it's 3 followed by 56 zeros. If your calculator doesn't understand scientific notation at all, you can keep track of the exponents in your head or on paper, and just let the calculator calculate mantissas.
For example, the gain of an op-amp is usually determined by the ratio of the feedback resistor to the series input resistor. If a bad solder joint or a drop of sweat gets into the circuit board and adjusts this ratio, the output power will be adjusted -- possibly down, possibly up. It depends on what exactly was adjusted. And if the new power isn't too much higher, it may not even fry something.
It's not worth arguing about, but my original point still stands.
Not all hams follow the rules. Some don't follow the rules, and eventually get smacked down by the FCC and often lose their licenses.Merely having the license is NOT enough. You have to follow the rules, and that's NOT a given.
As for hiding it, every WiFi packet has your SSID right there in cleartext. Even if you're using WEP (which would not be allowed under the ham rules.) Cloaking merely removes the SSID from beacon packets (but it's still there if data is transmitted) and turning off beacon packets (data packets still have it, of course.)
My point was that merely possessing a ham license is not enough -- you have to follow all the ham rules. Which is fine for trying to set a `world record', but makes it pretty impractical for many of the things that people want to use these long distance WiFi links for.
Of course, you did mention mountains so obviously you're aware of the concept, though to say that the curvature of the Earth can only be beat by bouncing the signal off of something isn't really right.
Using a satellite, moon bounce or meteor scatter may get you further than a tall antenna, but tall antennas certainly do overcome the curvature of the Earth to a signifigant degree.
If you could use 27.000 mHz to 27.999 mHz, you probably couldn't squeeze 11 mb/s out of that, but 1 mb/s should be doable. (Of course, this wouldn't be WiFi, so the entire point is moot. And of course the FCC would smack you down ...)
The data transmission speed is not directly related to the frequency used. Instead, it's related to the bandwidth used. The frequency comes into play only because the higher your frequency, the more bandwidth is available (as a general rule.) One WiFi signal takes up the same bandwidth as everything from 0-30 mHz combined -- AM radio, all the ham HF bands, shortwave, Loran, CB radio, six R/C channels and lots and lots more.
It won't. Meteor scatter or tropospheric ducting might. Meteor scatter would certainly work, but it rarely lasts long and tends to distort the signal (which would make WiFi unusable.) I don't know if 2.4 gHz signals are subject to tropospheric ducting or not.Moon bounce is another option, though you're going to need either a lot more power or MUCH larger antennas. But it would be cool if they could make it work -- they could do distances approaching 12,000 miles ...
This comment of mine goes into it a bit more detail.
This page may help you determine how far the horizon is given a certain height. (And don't forget that a nautical mile is 1.15 miles.)
If we assume that each antenna is on top of a 5,000 foot mountain, with nothing in between this gives a line of sight distance of 190 miles. If we raise the mountains to 15,000 feet, the distance becomes 320 miles (though I'm not sure that sutiable mountains even exist that are that tall, that close, and have nothing inbetween to interfere. You could use an airplane or balloon instead of a mountain, but then aiming the antenna (and even getting it up there) becomes very difficult.)
This is certainly possible, and in fact if you could find the proper location (i.e. two tall mountains with nothing in between) and even bigger antennas, you might be able to go even further.
Ok, if you're talking to a satellite this all goes out the window, because it's all line of site. In that case, it's only a matter of how good your antennas are. But yes, you can get a signal to a satellite with only a watt of power or so -- hams do it all the time. And this doesn't even require really fancy antennas if the satellite is low, like the ISS is.And while hams can use any antenna they want, they can only do this on the ham bands while following ham rules. In the US, this means IDing yourself every 10 minutes, no encryption, no pecuniary interest, third party traffic restrictions, etc.
Hate to burst your bubble, but 1) no antenna can guarantee this (after all, things do malfunction), and 2) there is some room for a hobbiest to legally make his own transmitters, antennas and such without a ham license and without FCC certification. Using this antenna with a standard WiFi card probably won't qualify, but it can be done. Not if you're trying to break some world record like this. But they probably can if you're using your cantenna to leech off your neighbor's WiFi connection and you get caught.(Nice use of the word `podunk' in there. It's totally irrelevant (as large police departments don't have the right either), and yet it's a nice jab at Lozito.)
This includes cases where I'm quoting myself, like this one. If this is stupid, I was misquoted.
Of course, I'm being sarcastic here. Opera and Opera users may not think they're being counted properly, but according to this page most of the website statistics services already count them correctly, spoofed or not.
And often it took the form of whining ... `This report is so unfair to Opera users ... there's so many more of us than your web server logs show, etc.'
It's whining when every time soembody attempts to count how popular each browser is, somebody has to point out how innaccurate it is because `it doesnt' count Opera users properly.' If the Opera developers wanted Opera to be counted properly, it wouldn't spoof it's user agent by default. Mozilla doesn't, Firefox doesn't, Netscape doesn't, IE doesn'tSurely they were aware of the risk of not being counted properly when they made the decision to spoof their User agent. It was their decision, and they knew what they were doing. They need to live with the (minor, imho) consequences, or fix it (as they're finally doing, good for them.)
And as for the users, if they feel that it's important that Opera be counted properly, the first thing they need to do is make sure their own personal installations report their User agents correctly.
No, I don't get your point. Are Opera users slaves or something? What does any of this have to do with slavery?All I'm talking about is if Opera makes up 0.2% of the browser market, or some higher percentage. To try and compare that to slavery, well, makes it look like slavery was/is a trivial issue.
If you're asking me, you're asking the wrong person. I said nothing about Opera the browser. My comments were about Opera the company and Opera users, and probably only a small (but vocal) minority of those. I said no such thing. Your English comprehension skills may be lame, but I said no such thing about the Opera browser.Opera (the company) has always whined that they weren't being properly counted because of they defaulted to pretending to be IE, so it'll be good to finally remove this whine. (Of course, they can still whine about it, as they'll say it's people using older versions, or people who have changed it manually, so maybe nothing will change.)
In any event, lumpy didn't say anything about huge scale websites.
Probably a bigger limitation is that MSSQL just runs on PCs (and Windows, for that matter.) So that limits the hardware you can throw at a problem.
I'm sure it can. Just like MSSQL+perl or java can work. (Actually, you can do perl in ASP if you wish, and probably java too. ASP doesn't force you to use virtual basicUnder java, it's even easier. Just put Opta2000.jar into your CLASSPATH, and use the correct database URL, and it all just works. (For the record, I do perl programming and not java programming, but I work with lots of people who write java programs that work with MSSQL, Oracle or DB2 with no changes beyond the database URL, and am I familiar with the basics of it.)
PHP's database problem is that it doesn't abstract the database layer away from anything. If you write an application to work with MSSQL, it'll only work with MSSQL. At least this was the case last time I lookedEither way, it's not MSSQL's fault. It's PHP's. An application written on a language with proper SQL support will generally work on a new database with only some very minor changes.
Any time I'm forced to defend Microsoft or one of it's products, I feel like I should be looking for the Candid Camera guys ...
With the right JDBC driver, java talks to MSSQL just fine. Even java running on *nix has no problems working with a MSSQL database on Windows box. It just works, and lots of `large scale websites' use java and MSSQL together.
Personally, I run perl code on my Linux box that works on a MSSQL database. It works fine too, though I've been a little frustrated that FreeTDS doesn't support placeholders yet. (But this is a limitation of FreeTDS, not MSSQL. And apparantly you can work around it by using ODBC, which I'm not going to do. But either way, it does work fine.)
Here in Texas, it's generally a class C misdemeanor. Just like speeding. In fact, the same form used for a speeding ticket is often used for the possession charge, and so your speeding ticket will often also tell you what the fine is for possession of drug paraphernalia.
I've never been a drug user, but from what I've heard, when a cop finds something, usually in a traffic stop, he confiscates it, and writes the ticket. I doubt the item even gets kept as evidence, let alone tested for drugs. And unless he actually finds real drugs, or there's a warrant out for the people in the car or they're drunk/high or something, he lets them go.
I imagine they could fight it in court easily enough, arguing that it was only for tobacco or for decoration, but I doubt anybody actually does that.
As for the head shops that sell bongs, the police generally leave them alone, and the shops themselves are very careful to instruct buyers on how to properly smoke tobacco with them when they sell one. (The police do occasionally get these shops for having more than six dildos, but that's another story.)
Good for you. Call down the fire and brimstone from above.A better plan would be to explain that it's legal, show your ham license (though it's not required), and if he does arrest you or take the device, fight it in court if it's cost effective to do so.
You're not going to get any satisfaction over fighting with the police about it. At most you're just going to spend thousands of dollars fighting a $100 ticket that the judge would probably throw out anyways because they can't find the law you're supposedly violating.
Even the press isn't going to care. It's not like they were beating you or something. They just got confused about the law.
(Of course, one thing that people seem to have forgotten is that while you can receive whatever you want, actually using a wireless AP, if you have no reason to expect that you're welcome to use it, is generally against the law. It's probably even a felony in most places. Wardriving (i.e. just listening) is one thing, but if you're parking looking at web pages using somebody else's AP, you're probably breaking the law, and the FCC isn't going to protect you.)
And even if the law agrees with you, the police, judge and jury may not. `Honest officer, this bong, er, water pipe is only for tobacco!'
Actually, if you're going under the ham rules, and using the ham part of the 2.4 gHz band, it's the unlicensed users who can't interfere with you.But the bigger issue is that you also need to follow the ham rules -- ID yourself every 10 minutes, no commercial traffic, no encryption, etc. And unless your system is smart enough to automatically limit itself to the power strictly needed, your power limit is just one watt. (But at least they will let you put your one watt into a big honking high-gain antenna.)
Hopefully he's got a Cops TV show camera man filming you getting your beatdown. Right or wrong, it's usually wise to be polite to the man with the badge and the gun. Calling him a fuckwad is not suggested, even if he is one. (Perhaps especially if he is one.)Really, there's little stopping them from using any US company's patented stuff at all -- I'm sure the companies would protest, but what's the US going to do about it? Go to war? Cut off diplomatic ties? Boycott them?
But they (China) may have problems selling stuff that uses this stuff to other countries, especially countries that are more inline with the US ideas of IP. Of course, China itself is a pretty large market, so this may not be a big problem.
(You as an experimenter could design and build such a device without any special permission. If a company were to do it and sell it commercially, I think they'd still need FCC certification.)
And of course, ham radio operators are licenced, and can use transmitters in the 2.4 gHz band, up to 1500 watts (or 1 or 100 watts if it's spread spectrum like WiFi), if they follow all the ham radio rules.
But anybody can listen to anything they want, and can make antennas for receiving of any sort. In fact, as long as you're only receiving and not transmitting, I don't see how wardriving could ever be illegal.
(I believe this even applies to listening to analog cell phone calls, though it is illegal to make or sell equipment that can listen to those bands. But I do believe it's still legal to listen to the calls, as long as you don't tell anybody else what you've heard. (The law is a bit more complicated than that, but I won't get into that right now.))
Oh really? I guess you've never heard of charges like `posession of drug paraphernalia' or anything like that? Similar things often apply to lock picks, crowbars and wire cutters as well. I agree that these laws are stupid (as there's already laws against having drugs and committing burglarly) but the are the law.But in this case, the police are nuts, and the FCC is likely to smack them down. Only the FCC gets to police the airwaves -- they've made this quite clear in the past.
However, for normal users, using normal power WiFi equipment, transmitting with one of these cantennas is illegal. Possession isn't, but transmitting is. The FCC regulations limit the amount of power you can transmit with, and it's based either on effective radiated power or volts/meter. Either way, any sort of directional antenna (like a cantenna) increases these figures without increasing the total power, and therefore exceed the FCC permitted power (unless they reduce their transmitter power by a similar amount, of course. Which they probably don't do.)
More on the story here, and google will find you more if you search for his name, vacuum and hand.
Certainly, our bodies can do without breathing nitrogen for a while. Deep divers sometimes use breathing gases like heliox with little or no nitrogen (as it can cause the nitrogen narcosis and the bends.)
As I understand it, the big problem with Apollo 1 was that it had 100% oxygen ... at over one atmosphere. Had they used 100% oxygen and 1/4 or so atmosphere, like used in space, the fire would not have burned out of control like that.
Looks like you're right but the space suits certainly don't. (I guess overpressure is a much bigger issue in a space suit, which makes sense. Overpressure means you need a thicker suit, and a thicker suit (and the overpressure itself) means you have less and less flexibility. Certainly, astronauts can't do much in their space suits.)(Of course, all figures quoted are approximate.)
By reducing the pressure, they reduce the stress on the craft, the effects of an explosive decompression, they don't need to carry nitrogen with them, etc.
The Apollo 1 astronauts were killed by this, sort of. During the test, the capsule was filled with 100% oxygen as is customary, but they left it at full pressure. So the partial pressure of oxygen was 5x normal, which was high enough to make velcro burn very quickly ...
In any event, since we'd assume that their bodies would have acclimated to the reduced pressure, the pressure inside your arm would also be 1/5 atmosphere before you stuck it out in space.
I don't know how the body would react to going from 0.2 atmospheres to 0 atmospheres, but it would certainly be a lot less dramatic than going from 1 to 0.
I imagine that the effect would be like getting a hickey (but all over your body), at least with a 0.5 or so atmosphere difference. With a 0.2 atmosphere difference, the effect may be even smaller. I recall once giving a hickey and getting blood out, which really surprised me. But yet I didn't actually break the skin. I don't know how much of a vacuum I could create, but it wouldn't surprise me if blood and other fluids could start seeping out of somebody all over their body suddenly dropped from 1 to 0 atmospheres. Not explosive, but it could become life threatening very quickly if it happened body-wide. (Or maybe your body's pressure would quickly adjust and the blood/fluids loss would be small.)
Actually, I'd expect the greatest dangers to be 1) lack of oxygen, and 2) if you didn't let all of the air out of your lungs first, they'd expand and could very well be damaged by the difference in pressure. Radiation is indeed a danger, but unless it's extremely severe, it won't kill you in minutes, like lack of oxygen can.