Tue, 20 Jan 2004

Hack Night
Hack Night was a little more interesting tonight. Matt and Rob were well on their way on creating the new "hardware" for conworks when i arrived.

I thought it was a pretty slick package -- a nice tripod mount with a waterproof enclosure bolted to the side. Inside was some sort of routerboard, cant remember the name. It had a couple ethernet interfaces, PCI slot, pcmcia slots, etc. They popped in two Senao cards...one was the old 100mW version, the other is a newer 200mW.

To be mounted to this mast will be a 24dBi parabolic (aimed at Matt's node on Capital Hill), and a 15dBi omni. This omni should provide about -75dBm signal to any pcmcia card (-4dBm) within 2 miles. Talk about lighting up the entire north part of downtown!

Near the end of Hack Night was some really weird talk of future "projects". The drift of it was more along the lines of building an application rather than just building a network to ping back and forth with. The application's needs would then drive the requirements and motivation to install specific wireless links and hardware in specific locations. Sounds like a better approch to me. When the personal computer was first invented, it was a solution without a problem. Same goes for the internet (and it still is the case depending on your outlook) Maybe we can learn from his and actually come up with some problems to drive network development.

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Passive Repeaters
Its interesting that the number one "excuse" for slow CWN growth is lack of "line of sight" to key locations. We forget that this problem was solved long ago in the microwave haydays using passive repeaters.

You may have seen one of these bellow -- a weird panel, with no wires, on the side of towers. What is it? A passive repeater! They are good from 1.7GHz-40GHz, and they are all over the place. Its already installed and free to use.

Passive repeater mounted to a KING-5 TV tower

It might be worth the effort to catalog the locations of these passive repeaters, and run them against our node databases to see if they can be put to good use.

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