| Magnus on Mon, 9 Jun 2003 23:17:04 -0400 |
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What kind of coverage do you expect from the omni-nodes? Would you consider this a one building kind of option? My initial investigations out here in the northern suburbs (Lansdale, Mont Co) lead me to think that special antennas won't get you good high speed coverage over a reasonable distance (say more than a square acre or two) with 802.11b and standard hardware. Put a 4 foot long antenna on a 12 foot tall mast on a 3 foot tall tripod on the roof of a tall building and you could very well cover much more than just the one house (though the area directly under the antenna may have bad coverage, which is what you may have been thinking of). Performance is such a hard thing to predict. You have different amounts of tree coverage, different building materials & heights, etc. I think each situation will be unique. Some of the other community mesh networks are actually getting pretty decent coverage out of their omnis. There is a guy in DelCo who has gotten a good signal several blocks from his omni. For a expensive twist, check out the /. article about using Airport stations to cover a house. The author is proposing $150-$250/node and suggests adding nodes until you get your entire house covered. Seems kind of pricey to me.
The house I'm in now is huge, and has double walls which kills my signal. What makes matters worse is I'm using an Apple TiBook which has terrible reception. Still, I think with two WAPs I could pretty well blanket the house. I might even be able to do it with just the one if I put a bigger antenna on the WAP and pop my Cisco card into the TiBook. On a side note, do you have an archive for the DelCo list? I'd like to review it once in a while. If you need something, I can throw it up on http://kevb.net:3000/lurker/splash/index.html . The DelCo list that I mentioned today just started up, and is run by someone else. I have no control over it. There have been no posts on it yet, except me griping a bit about it being set up less than optimally. ;-) The project that gr & I are collaborating on will likely find its own home once there is something more tangible to share. Right now it's vaporware. Ideally I'd like to host the mailing list and web site *within* the mesh, but on a host that is multihomed so that those outside the mesh can still get at it too. Lemme worry about getting the mesh up first though. ;-) Once we've got something up worth talking about, I'm sure a proper list will be set up in short order and everyone here will be made well aware. - -- Chris "Magnus" Hedemark UNIX / Linux / BSD / Mac OS X / Windows consulting available. No job too small! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.3.2 (Darwin) iEYEARECAAYFAj7lTZ8ACgkQYPuF4Zq9lvatRQCgiiRqm9PLoyLco5VijVxJ+gXw hE4AoL5lAKe06qm9Fi9SMTL1tiQpo6wy =lRbu -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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