Magnus on Tue, 10 Jun 2003 15:29:05 -0400


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Re: [PLUG] Wireless LAN Coverage in The Suburbs


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On Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 03:09 PM, Jeffrey Mealo wrote:

I feel left out because I am not in the city, Linux users (or power
users in general) are hard to find.

I live in DelCo and have had no trouble.

I live in Glen Mills/Chester
Heights/Concordville if anyone is familiar with that area (Zipcode:
19342).

Is that Chester County? If so there is a LUG serving that area, CCLUG, which may be a good place to meet local Linux enthusiasts.


Would there be any possibility of extending the lan outside of
Phillidelphia and if so how.

Absolutely. In fact it is *starting* outside of the city. I'm going out tonight to do a rooftop survey as a matter of fact in Swarthmore, which is probably like 15 miles or so outside of Center City.


What would our goals be?  We'd need to
have a  very good plan that's expandable and practical with potential
mount points and assign people to try to get them established.

Working on it.

The
mount points would a) need to meet our needs b) be willing to. I figure
if you were to map it out on freely available topography data with the
aid of a GPS we could do a pretty precise job of placing repeaters in
locations.

I've already been driving around "bookmarking" interesting sites for repeaters. My criteria for these sites has changed a little based on my experience trying to deal with tower owners vs. building managers.


I live rather close to a radio tower (okay, maybe not, I
never go down that road, it could *look* deceivingly close).  What kind
of range would we be roughly looking at per repeater and how heavily
does the mount point affect this.

I've heard of links as far as 72 miles with 802.11b.

More realistically, with a good LOS, I'd be thrilled with 15 miles. And would try to keep the critical ones under 10.

Also, I am extremely confident if we
were to write to let's say Net Gear and or Linksys we could receive
discounted rates and or full/parital sponsorship.

Hmmm not so sure. They haven't been terribly friendly about people hacking their firmware, which is just what is necessary to use their kit in a mesh.


... This is the topic that's too good to let die ;), it just keeps going
and going.

Well the Delco Wireless mailing list seems to be dead on arrival. The list mom isn't answering my requests and there is no one else posting there yet. This is about as good a place as any to talk about it for now, but when the Mac & Windoze and other niche groups want in we're probably going to want to move off to another list somewhere.


I'm ordering some hardware this weekend (the Dell AP's that gr mentioned) to try to hack the firmware. If I can get an IPv6 stack and OSPF in there, that will be something to get excited about. If I can also get it to run in HostAP mode (on top of the other stuff) then we've really got something to be stoked about.

Jeffrey, how far are you from West Chester? I know a ham operator up there who lives on high ground and has a tower. I could be wrong but I think he's exempt from the part 15 restrictions on antenna height (and maybe even output) since he's a licensed ham. I haven't talked to him about this yet but it sounds like the sort of thing he might want to get in on. From the top of his roof he has a pretty commanding view so his site could be instrumental in Chester County if we can somehow get him linked in (and he is game to run a repeater site).

- --

Chris "Magnus" Hedemark
UNIX / Linux / BSD / Mac OS X / Windows consulting available. No job too small!
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