Magnus on 8 Feb 2004 04:05:03 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] What became of the wireless mesh talk? What can I do to help?



On Saturday, February 7, 2004, at 09:37 PM, tom wrote:

That would be me. As I mentioned to you, I have a couple of 486DX4-100 single
board computers that I'd be willing to donate to the project. The have a
10BaseT connection, PC104 connector and can boot from flash (among other
features). I'm also an engineering tech, so I know electronics and RF well.

Hold onto it. You may want it for your own node. Ideally any spec that comes out of this project will be OS and hardware agnostic such that you can use anything you want for hardware and OS (so long as you get the protocols and the RF spec right). And where are you located?


What we need more than anything is:

1) Sponsorship for access points and antennas to put in high centralized locations, and setting up long haul links from town to town. Very high & very central locations (like the one I'm about to mention) will have some more extravagant needs to support the many point-to-point connections that they will need to service.
2) Places to put nodes where a lot of people can get at them (clear Line Of Sight).


While I'm perfectly happy to pay for hardware to put a few antennas on my own roof, I'm hoping that some sponsors (or local cooperatives) will foot the bill for putting AP's up in very high places like water towers, tall office buildings, anyplace with a good LOS over the surrounding area. Obviously we also need benefactors to grant us permission to put AP's on such high points.

Putting an AP on top of your house is great and all, but it is the very high ones that are going to have the most impact. Major major kudos to anyone who can (1) find funding for a nice collection of the needed hardware and (2) secure permission from property management at the tallest buildings in Center City to let us put equipment up there. That is a tall order but will have the most impact on this. I've already verified that Swarthmore has a LOS to Center City (see http://trilug.org/~chrish/gallery/swarth-roof/DSCF0083 (click on that pic to zoom in more)). gr doesn't have LOS to Center City, but I think it's reasonable for him to expect to be able to hit the roof that I took that picture from. Now the distance from this rooftop to Center City is probably somewhere around 14 miles (guessing) so the fun project then becomes setting up a reliable long-term point-to-point link over a distance of ~14 miles.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not." - Mark Twain

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