This is good advice for engineers: I was talking with a US Army Lt. just before he shipped off to Iraq and his #1 complaint was the ruggedness of the equipment. He had just recieved the latest handheld GPS reciever and was testing it for his troops, by testing, I mean running over it with a Hummwv. Surprisingly, it survived the first couple of times before the screen failed. This lieutenant told it to me this way: "You take any one of my soldiers, put them in a padded room with a steel ball, and one of two things is going to happen; they're going to eat it...or break it...Whatever works in the lab has to work after being run over, pushed into three feet of mud, washed clean with diesel, shoved into somebody's webgear, and thrown repeatedly through the air in a game of pickup football with the local villiage kids. THAT's the mindset you engineers need to have when you build this sh*t." It's not that these guys are dumb with equipment, just the opposite, but when you are pushing your way through a rubble filled street taking fire, the last thing you are worried about is protecting that PDA strapped to your belt. This conversation changed the way I thought. It's not all that much more expensive to waterproof and impact resistance a device, if you consider that BEFORE you start the design. Skip the written parameters, build it to LAST. My $.0025 worth.
Also in Washington - Yakima County Wifi Network
on
Wheat Field Wi-Fi
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· Score: 4, Informative
Cisco carries a brief press release on the Yakima County public safety network, a WiFi network that replaced the old repeater/trunking radio network.
Yakima county is the second largest (by area)county in Washington state and with careful site planning and radio engineering, they are able to cover almost the entire county with 30 wireless bridges. You have to realize that most of the county is located in a large valley surrounded by fairly tall hills, so it is an ideal candidate for line-of-site networks. But to cover 4,296.1 square miles in such a manner is pretty impressive.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps 430/prod_business_case09186a00800a9de3.html
The press release is very bland compared to the actual implementation. The police and safety officials seem to love it. This network is now becoming a standard for implementation by many of the rural counties in Washington and Oregon.
Slashdot Mirror
Had to laugh hard stumbling upon that one...
This is good advice for engineers: I was talking with a US Army Lt. just before he shipped off to Iraq and his #1 complaint was the ruggedness of the equipment. He had just recieved the latest handheld GPS reciever and was testing it for his troops, by testing, I mean running over it with a Hummwv. Surprisingly, it survived the first couple of times before the screen failed. This lieutenant told it to me this way: "You take any one of my soldiers, put them in a padded room with a steel ball, and one of two things is going to happen; they're going to eat it...or break it...Whatever works in the lab has to work after being run over, pushed into three feet of mud, washed clean with diesel, shoved into somebody's webgear, and thrown repeatedly through the air in a game of pickup football with the local villiage kids. THAT's the mindset you engineers need to have when you build this sh*t." It's not that these guys are dumb with equipment, just the opposite, but when you are pushing your way through a rubble filled street taking fire, the last thing you are worried about is protecting that PDA strapped to your belt. This conversation changed the way I thought. It's not all that much more expensive to waterproof and impact resistance a device, if you consider that BEFORE you start the design. Skip the written parameters, build it to LAST. My $.0025 worth.
Cisco carries a brief press release on the Yakima County public safety network, a WiFi network that replaced the old repeater/trunking radio network. Yakima county is the second largest (by area)county in Washington state and with careful site planning and radio engineering, they are able to cover almost the entire county with 30 wireless bridges. You have to realize that most of the county is located in a large valley surrounded by fairly tall hills, so it is an ideal candidate for line-of-site networks. But to cover 4,296.1 square miles in such a manner is pretty impressive. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps 430/prod_business_case09186a00800a9de3.html
The press release is very bland compared to the actual implementation. The police and safety officials seem to love it. This network is now becoming a standard for implementation by many of the rural counties in Washington and Oregon.