J
Joel Kolstad
Hi Jim,
A quick Googling shows July 2005 ("IEEE 802.11 Experiments in Virginia's
Shenandoah Valley"), but there was also one in the last 3 months or so that
was really just an overview of how 802.11 worked (aimed very much at
beginners, actually, with an eye towards amateur usage, e.g., "Making your
SSID your call sign is a good idea...").
Agreed, although as I've mentioned previously, these days most of what happens
on the amateur frequencies *could* just as readily be done with cell phones or
your DSL/cable modem/POTS Internet connection. I think the commercial
entities are much more interested in getting the *spectrum* that hams have
rather than trying to force the local Elks to quite using a 2m repeater to
coordinate their meetings.
There is a long history of amateur radio being used to avoid expensive
commercial services: People used it for years as a replacement for long
distance telephone calls prior to those rates becoming dirt cheap. It's
almost ironic to what extent this motivates people -- international calls that
were $5/minute in 1970 are now often no more than $0.05/minute, yet there's
still plenty of interest in, e.g., Skype to reduce that to "free!" (after you
pay your fixed monthly Internet bill). Heck, these days I think that
satellite phones cost less per minute than many international calls 35 years
ago!
One area that isn't readily available commercially yet is "reasonably"
high-speed Internet connections (e.g., 256kbps or better) for folks who are
mobile out in the boonies (i.e., somewhere there's no modern cell phone
coverage); that's where I'd really like to see some progress in amateur radio
(on UHF frequencies, I would imagine). WiMax might offer a viable commercial
solution here, but I imagine there are going to be large stretches of the
western and central U.S. where it'll be many decades before it's profitable to
deploy WiMax or high-speed cell phone networks; in such places a hilltop
amateur system could let amateurs with the typical 50W mobile radio "check
their e-mail" for many tens of miles in all directions.
I also think it would be cool to build something like an HF PSK31 gateway back
to the popular Internet instant-messaging services (Yahoo!, MSN!, etc.) -- I
figure the way to approach this would be to hack together the bits of PSK31
code out there with the bits of a multi-protocol messaging program such as
Pidgin (formerly GAIM).
---Joel
Jim Lux said:
A quick Googling shows July 2005 ("IEEE 802.11 Experiments in Virginia's
Shenandoah Valley"), but there was also one in the last 3 months or so that
was really just an overview of how 802.11 worked (aimed very much at
beginners, actually, with an eye towards amateur usage, e.g., "Making your
SSID your call sign is a good idea...").
Agreed, although as I've mentioned previously, these days most of what happens
on the amateur frequencies *could* just as readily be done with cell phones or
your DSL/cable modem/POTS Internet connection. I think the commercial
entities are much more interested in getting the *spectrum* that hams have
rather than trying to force the local Elks to quite using a 2m repeater to
coordinate their meetings.
There is a long history of amateur radio being used to avoid expensive
commercial services: People used it for years as a replacement for long
distance telephone calls prior to those rates becoming dirt cheap. It's
almost ironic to what extent this motivates people -- international calls that
were $5/minute in 1970 are now often no more than $0.05/minute, yet there's
still plenty of interest in, e.g., Skype to reduce that to "free!" (after you
pay your fixed monthly Internet bill). Heck, these days I think that
satellite phones cost less per minute than many international calls 35 years
ago!
One area that isn't readily available commercially yet is "reasonably"
high-speed Internet connections (e.g., 256kbps or better) for folks who are
mobile out in the boonies (i.e., somewhere there's no modern cell phone
coverage); that's where I'd really like to see some progress in amateur radio
(on UHF frequencies, I would imagine). WiMax might offer a viable commercial
solution here, but I imagine there are going to be large stretches of the
western and central U.S. where it'll be many decades before it's profitable to
deploy WiMax or high-speed cell phone networks; in such places a hilltop
amateur system could let amateurs with the typical 50W mobile radio "check
their e-mail" for many tens of miles in all directions.
I also think it would be cool to build something like an HF PSK31 gateway back
to the popular Internet instant-messaging services (Yahoo!, MSN!, etc.) -- I
figure the way to approach this would be to hack together the bits of PSK31
code out there with the bits of a multi-protocol messaging program such as
Pidgin (formerly GAIM).
---Joel
