Without clear Line Of Sight do not exist. I intend to solve that
problem. If I do, I'll get rich. The equipment now being offered is
not deigned by people who live in rural ares, but engineers who, at
best, are in suburban office parks.

Right now, I'm using the satellite data from hughes.net. Its not the
high speed bandwidth advertised. The power supply was designed to be
plugged into the wall. [that's a period] But if you live out here, you
know the power goes out. but if you plug their power supply into your
UPS, you find the damn thing blocks the next two backed up power
outlets. Hello?

I've tried the 900mhz wireless transceiver. which needs a clear LOS
(Line of Sight). I like living in the woods; and I'm not going to
clearcut just so I can get a clear line of sight to the ISP
transmitter tower. Hello?

I also have a place in a deep hollow by a spring fed trout stream. No
way will any of the commecially available wireless transmitters work
down there. You cant even use a cell phone. Hello?

No, I'm thinking about 180 mhz, kinda close to TV channel 8, but...
out here, the nearest TV channel 8 transmitter is 300 miles away.
Besides, TV antennas are being scrapped all the time; everyone is
switching to Dish TV. Out in rural areas, RFI/EMI from ham gear no
longer bothers anyone watching TV.

Besides, seems like there mite be pulse emitters/detectors that work
at this speed. No Carrier wave, no IF. Technically, its *NOT*
"radio". Ordinary tuners would ignore it; it aint AM nor FM. A 12 db
antenna would be about 13' foot long. Awta go 30 miles to an ISP in
some town that stays up serving users on the weekends. I've tried all
three of the local small town ISPs, which have a nasty habit of
crashing on friday nite, and not coming back online til monday
morning.

I called "support" one time to bitch, and mentioned that I used Linux.
The response: "What's Linux?"

But what's the best option to go from full duplex into the PC? will
the standard LAN multiplex at 180mhz? RS232?

Day Brown wrote:
But what's the best option to go from full duplex into the PC? will
the standard LAN multiplex at 180mhz? RS232?

Y'know, in the "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" trilogy by the late
Douglas Adams, there were three arks of humanity. The first was filled
with all the thinkers. The third was filled with all the folks who got
things done. The second ark, however, was filled with all the folks who
didn't really do much for a living. They were the vice presidents of
companies, the executive managers, the marketing people, the lawyers,
the car salesmen, and the career politicians.

The second ark crash landed on earth. The survivors decided that if
they were going to survive, they needed to build a committee to find
figure out this "fire" thing. And the first question they asked was how
were they going to market this sort of thing. Were they going to aim to
build a pocket fire? Would people buy portable fires? Did they want
them in different colors? How would they sell fire?

This is where you are. You know there is something out there that needs
doing. However, you have no clue how to go about it. So you ask
peripheral questions to see if anyone else is going to step forward and
do your homework for you.

Honestly, there is so much to know and so much to learn that I couldn't
possibly summarize it here. But to start you off, a router interface
with a serial WAN port will work. So will SLIP on an RS-232 link. But
I suspect you knew that already. Good luck building your radio. Be
sure to post the details on the web if you ever get it to work...

Jake Brodsky
Amateur Radio Station AB3A

"Day Brown" ) writes:

No, I'm thinking about 180 mhz, kinda close to TV channel 8, but...
out here, the nearest TV channel 8 transmitter is 300 miles away.
Besides, TV antennas are being scrapped all the time; everyone is
switching to Dish TV. Out in rural areas, RFI/EMI from ham gear no
longer bothers anyone watching TV.

Besides, seems like there mite be pulse emitters/detectors that work
at this speed. No Carrier wave, no IF. Technically, its *NOT*
"radio". Ordinary tuners would ignore it; it aint AM nor FM. A 12 db
antenna would be about 13' foot long. Awta go 30 miles to an ISP in
some town that stays up serving users on the weekends. I've tried all
three of the local small town ISPs, which have a nasty habit of
crashing on friday nite, and not coming back online til monday
morning.

Of course it's radio. You'll find that if you aren't radiating a signal,
there's no signal and it's not radio. Otherwise, it's radio. And that
means licensing and all the rest.

And there's a good reason wifi is higher in frequency. Because the
bandwidth is there, to allow for multiple signals. Likewise, the shorter
range means losts of points can reuse the same frequency, because the range
is quite limited. And of course, the higher the bandwidth of data, the
more radio space it uses.

Move to a lower frequency, and you'll have less chance to control the signal.
You may find there's too much interference to other users. There may not
be enough radio bandwidth for everyone who wants it.

That you don't realize this would be radio is a good indication, like someone
else suggests, that there is no solution for you because you don't have
the grounding to go anywhere with it.

Michael VE2BVW

On Mar 3, 1:28 pm, (Michael Black) wrote:
"Day Brown" ) writes:
No, I'm thinking about 180 mhz, kinda close to TV channel 8, but...
out here, the nearest TV channel 8 transmitter is 300 miles away.
Besides, TV antennas are being scrapped all the time; everyone is
switching to Dish TV. Out in rural areas, RFI/EMI from ham gear no
longer bothers anyone watching TV.

Besides, seems like there mite be pulse emitters/detectors that work
at this speed. No Carrier wave, no IF. Technically, its *NOT*
"radio". Ordinary tuners would ignore it; it aint AM nor FM. A 12 db
antenna would be about 13' foot long. Awta go 30 miles to an ISP in
some town that stays up serving users on the weekends. I've tried all
three of the local small town ISPs, which have a nasty habit of
crashing on friday nite, and not coming back online til monday
morning.

Of course it's radio. You'll find that if you aren't radiating a signal,
there's no signal and it's not radio. Otherwise, it's radio. And that
means licensing and all the rest.

And there's a good reason wifi is higher in frequency. Because the
bandwidth is there, to allow for multiple signals. Likewise, the shorter
range means losts of points can reuse the same frequency, because the range
is quite limited. And of course, the higher the bandwidth of data, the
more radio space it uses.

Move to a lower frequency, and you'll have less chance to control the signal.
You may find there's too much interference to other users. There may not
be enough radio bandwidth for everyone who wants it.

That you don't realize this would be radio is a good indication, like someone
else suggests, that there is no solution for you because you don't have
the grounding to go anywhere with it.
The whole reason there's a problem is that there aint that many users.
If there was, DSL would be here. If you drive from Little Rock north
thru the Ozarks up US 65 twards Springfield MO, most of the time you
can use your cell phone. But get 20 miles east or west of that string
of transponders, and its dead even if you are on a mountain, never
mind behind a ridgeline, much less down in a creek bottom.

For right now, there arent any other users. And even if I get this
developed and working, there wont be that many. The population density
is low. The biggest town in Van Buren county is Clinton, pop 3000, and
in Searcy county Marshall, 1200. And if you drive from Clinton to
Marshall, the only town is Leslie, pop 627. Moreover, if you drive up
US 65 from Leslie twards Marshall and hit the search button on your
FM, it'll find the Christian fund radio station in Marshall. Hit
'search' again, and it'll find.... the Christian fundy radio station
in Marhsall. There is dead air all over the TV and radio bands out
here that nobody is doing anything with, nor will they ever.

Bring a portable TV up here, and the rabbit ear antenna will find two
TV channels: 4 & 6; and if you come down off the ridgetop, only 6. I
got a 12ft boom Yagi on a 25' mast on the top of a ridge, and all I
can get are 2,4,6,7,11 in watchable condition. 16,20,38,42 are too
snowy to bother with. Anyone who wants to watch much TV or listen to
the radio gets a satellite dish.

I'm only 6 air miles from Clinton, but the ISPs to hook up to are all
in town, down in the valley with a mountain to get over. CB radio at
27mhz can bend down in there, but anything over 100 mhz looks dubious.
Leslie has an ISP up on the side of a ridge, that would be close to
line of sight, but I'd havta clearcut about 14 miles of timber to get
thru unless I get down to 400 mhz which has a wavelength longer than
wet pine needles. Even if I could get over that, the pine grows about
18"/year.

One of the reason folks live out here is we like the woods; there's a
lot of it. National & state forest, game & fish land, transnational
paper loblolly pine plantations and our own private woodlots. None of
the commercially available transceivers can punch thru it all,
especially when its wet. Looks like there's a problem with my
Hughes.net satellite dish when it gets wet too. I called after the
last hard rain, over a week ago, they said they'd get a service rep
right out. I heard from him on thurs finally saying he'd be out next
tues. Its a hundred mile drive, so its not somethign they like to do
often.

I need a piece of equipment I can maintain myself and deal with the
server end when I go to town shopping. Its only been in the last 5
years that Alltel in Searcy county replaced *rotary dial* with
touchtone. Til then, the "Welcome Home" community fire dept had a
party line. If you know what that is. The sheer backwardness of many
rural areas makes low frequency transceivers necessary. I dont blame
them; its damn expensive to bury cable when you need 3000' foot per
customer. When I first got on line, I hadda run a mile of my own
cable.

With 12db tuned yagi on each end, I should be able to cover the
distance with only a few watts. It aint like it'd be walking on
anything anyone else had, and it aint like the FCC is gonna bother
sending agents all the way out here to try to find my setup. They
couldnt even find jerks in major metro areas putting 1000 watts on a
CB channel. We usta hear them walking all over our own neighborhood
rigs in the woods.

All the folks in town have DSL; that leaves only maybe 15,000 spread
out over 1250 sq miles of hills. And of those, with 4/house, less than
4000 PCs that mite possibly want to be online on about 200 acre farms
each. Scattered in all directions. With the directionality of tuned
Yagi, nobody would be interefering with anyone else's signal. Arent
there notch filters that only accept a few megahertz? And pulse
detectors that'd recognize clipped sine wave peaks for zero and the
normal amplitude as one?

On Sat, 03 Mar 2007 10:37:18 -0800, Day Brown wrote:

.. But if you live out here, you
know the power goes out. but if you plug their power supply into your
UPS, you find the damn thing blocks the next two backed up power
outlets. Hello?

Save yourself alot of bother. Buy a 'power strip' and plug it into your UPS.
Viola! Extra backed-up sockets.

Day Brown wrote:
All the folks in town have DSL; that leaves only maybe 15,000 spread
out over 1250 sq miles of hills. And of those, with 4/house, less than
4000 PCs that mite possibly want to be online on about 200 acre farms
each. Scattered in all directions. With the directionality of tuned
Yagi, nobody would be interefering with anyone else's signal. Arent
there notch filters that only accept a few megahertz? And pulse
detectors that'd recognize clipped sine wave peaks for zero and the
normal amplitude as one?

What you really need to do is to convince your local power company to
do what Israel Electric did. A long time ago they figured that BPL was
not worth it, but their right of way was. So they ran a fiber optic network
along with their power lines and use it to monitor and control their
distribituion equipment.

If they ever can get a license to sell Internet access, then they can just use
the fiber optics.

As for the local telephone company just upgrading from dial service, isn't
there a fairly large tax in the U.S. to support providing telephone
service to rural customers? Where did that money go?

Geoff.


--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838
Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/

"Day Brown" wrote in message
ups.com...
Without clear Line Of Sight do not exist. I intend to solve that
problem. If I do, I'll get rich.

There are plenty of solutions presently available, you're just saying you
don't like the price tags attached. That's understandable enough -- and there
is certainly money to be made if you can come up with cheaper solutions.

Right now, I'm using the satellite data from hughes.net. Its not the
high speed bandwidth advertised.

If you call them up and offer to pay lots of extra money, I'm sure they can
fix this for you. :-) Still, satellite bandwidth is expensive -- even the
military tries hard to avoid using them except in situations like yours, where
there simply is no other easy way to get data in and out of a remote area.

The power supply was designed to be
plugged into the wall. [that's a period] But if you live out here, you
know the power goes out. but if you plug their power supply into your
UPS, you find the damn thing blocks the next two backed up power
outlets. Hello?

You can get short (~6") "extension cords" that fix this problem (see:
http://www.cyberguys.com/templates/s...categoryID=35), or you
can get a power strip that has some of outlets spaced for wall warts. Almost
any store today will carry those.

I've tried the 900mhz wireless transceiver. which needs a clear LOS
(Line of Sight).

Only to get the maximum range. :-) Granted, the difference in usable distance
between LoS and "straight through a bunch of trees" could be 100:1.

I like living in the woods; and I'm not going to
clearcut just so I can get a clear line of sight to the ISP
transmitter tower. Hello?

ISPs are a business; they're not going to provide some "alternative" solution
for your needs unless they think they can make money off of you. This is one
of the things you have to accept when you chose to live in a remote
situation -- *everything* gets more expensive, and some things -- like
high-speed Internet access -- do so quite disproportionately (you know, this
is kinda why the whole idea of "towns" was invented in the first place? :-) ).
Think back to only 10 years ago, when trying to get a 3Mbps Internet
connection in a big city would have run thousands of bucks per month -- today
it's about $55!

You might write your local senator or representative and ask that they pass
some "rural high-speed Internetification act," but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
:-) (Like the REA many years ago...)

Besides, seems like there mite be pulse emitters/detectors that work
at this speed. No Carrier wave, no IF. Technically, its *NOT*
"radio".

It doesn't matter what you call it, the FCC regulates it. The pulse systems
you describe are similar to how UWB (ultrawide bandwidth) radios work, and
they're very much regulated by the FCC.

I guarantee you that if you start transmitting high-speed pulses and a high
enough power,
Ordinary tuners would ignore it; it aint AM nor FM.

This is highly unlikely: A high enough power pulse will certainly show up as
interference to any other radio system, even if it is just a brief "scratch."

A 12 db
antenna would be about 13' foot long. Awta go 30 miles to an ISP in
some town that stays up serving users on the weekends. I've tried all
three of the local small town ISPs, which have a nasty habit of
crashing on friday nite, and not coming back online til monday
morning.

Well, hey, more power to you if you can get it working... but don't coming
crying to us if the FCC does hit you with some huge fine or a group of
vigilantes spikes your coax and blows your transmitter.

I called "support" one time to bitch, and mentioned that I used Linux.
The response: "What's Linux?"

That's not surprising. Especially in a rural area, I suspect the number of
Linux users is probably well under 1%... you might as well have called them up
and asked if you could use your Atari ST with their services.

But what's the best option to go from full duplex into the PC? will
the standard LAN multiplex at 180mhz?

Define "standard LAN?"

In general protocols like Ethernet perform poorly when connected directly to
wireless links: Being originally designed for wired systems, the protocols
assume a very low bit error rate, which is exactly the wrong assumption to
make for a wireless system. Hence, the throughput tends to drop like a rock
unless you have a completely "solid" link.

I think you'd be best off doing the following:

1) Lose the attitude. It isn't helping you and just turns other off; you'll
receive much better responses if you simply state your situation and what
you're after rather than disparaging so many things, even if they do deserve
it (save that for after it's all working and you're kicking back with your
friends at a bar).
2) Plan on building yourself a tall tower such that you can mount a microwave
dish on it and hit a tower back in town. With WiFi at 2.4GHz, 30 miles is
probably a stretch, but at least you'll find there's a *lot* of support for
people doing it... and the equpiment to do so is reasonably inexpensive.
You'll still be looking at thousands of dollars here -- perhaps $10k --, but
if you have a, say, $250k home, just pretend it's part of your mortgage. :-)
3) Start visiting the nearest neighbors you *do* have. Many of them would
probably be interested in high-speed Internet access as well, and many would
be willing to contribute financially to your cause. Additionally, you might
consider doing some "mesh network" sort of approach, so that your signal only
has to make it to the next house, which relays it to the next house, etc.
4) If you get an amateur radio license (quite easy these days), you can
legally start pumping enough power at 2.4GHz that 30 miles will become easy.
This makes your Internet connection easy, although it then subjects the
content of that connection to all those amateur radio rules about not using it
for fiduciary gain, encrypted communications, etc. Many people will not be
unduly restricted by those rules (it's still OK to, e.g., buy stuff from
Amazon.Com... at least if you avoid the https: site? -- it is a little dicey
here).

Good luck... let us know how it goes...

---Joel

"Joel Kolstad" ) writes:

You can get short (~6") "extension cords" that fix this problem (see:
http://www.cyberguys.com/templates/s...categoryID=35), or you
can get a power strip that has some of outlets spaced for wall warts. Almost
any store today will carry those.

Or it takes no real skill to go to the hardware store, buy a cheap extension
cord, and a replacement plug, then cut down the extension cord and put the
new plug on the bare end of the short pair of wires that go to the female
end of the extension cord.

Of course, I only started doing that after I was using a full length extension
cord, that I carefully rolled up and tied. Actaully modifying the extension
cord was just to make it cleaner.

Michael VE2BVW

On 3 Mar 2007 10:37:18 -0800, "Day Brown" wrote:


I've tried the 900mhz wireless transceiver. which needs a clear LOS
(Line of Sight). I like living in the woods; and I'm not going to
clearcut just so I can get a clear line of sight to the ISP
transmitter tower. Hello?

For usable throughput at reasonable power you definitively need the
LOS path.

To get LOS, all you need is to move your antenna high enough. Towers
up to several hundred meters high are available commercially. Less
reliable solutions are flying the antenna under a kite or a balloon.

If this is too expensive, I would suggest moving to a more densely
populated area. You will have to find an optimum for the cost_of_land
+ cost_of_telecommunication.

As others have suggested, it might be enough if you have a LOS path to
your neighbour and they have a LOS path to their neighbour and finally
one neighbour have LOS contact to the ISP.

One other solution would be to move a repeater to a hilltop visible
both from your site and from the ISP, but there is the problem of
powering it. Solar cells might be an option, unless you live North of
the Arctic circle or the sky is cloudy all the time.

A passive reflector at the hilltop might also be possible, but this
will require very narrow beams, which will require large antennas at
both ends of the link, in practice in the upper microwave bands or
even IR or visible light. However, at these frequencies clouds etc.
will disrupt the communication.

Paul OH3LWR

On Mar 4, 2:44 am, (Geoffrey S. Mendelson) wrote:
What you really need to do is to convince your local power company to
do what Israel Electric did. A long time ago they figured that BPL was
not worth it, but their right of way was. So they ran a fiber optic network
along with their power lines and use it to monitor and control their
distribituion equipment.

If they ever can get a license to sell Internet access, then they can just use
the fiber optics.

As for the local telephone company just upgrading from dial service, isn't
there a fairly large tax in the U.S. to support providing telephone
service to rural customers? Where did that money go?
Alltel used the money to put up the cellular transponders along US 65
& in Harrison, its largest shopping zone.

Compare the population density of Israel with the Ozarks. Lotsa folks
beside me, still have property beyond the grid. That's much of why
folks move out here; they want to get waaaaay back. There are lotsa
places you can go outside at nite, and if you turn out the lites, its
totally pitch black because there are no other lights in any
direction. Lotsa folks own real estate entirely surrounded by
National forest, family farms that were never bought up.

There are simialar regions in the Rockies. I even read about a 'net'
that used packet radio spread across hundreds of miles of mountains.
Canada, Siberia, Australia, and other regions are also way too thinly
populated to afford anyone running cable.

we all know what lightning sounds like. The Titanic had a similar
"spark transmitter", Not that different from the spark coil in a gas
engine. I can see designing a circuit with a resonant tank to produce
a pulse with a wavelength matching a tuned Yagi. No carrier wave. No
frequency or amplitude modulation. And without being hooked up to a
tuned yagi pointed in the correct direction, none of the AM/FM/TV
tuners would pick it up. No IF either. A continuous train of pulses
would look like a carrier wave, but that aint what *data* is.

If, for instance a "1" is a postive pulse, but a "0" negative, and the
sequence of 0100011101010100110.... keeps changing, as it would with
data, then tuners would ignore it. There's no sin wave. Zeners have
been used in surge suppressors rated in nsec and I've seen sin wave
illustrations of the circuitry in psec intervals. Seems like something
mite be done.

Anyone know the data rate on the IR inputs on mthbds? Seems like the
response time on IR diodes is pretty quick too... Feeding the mthbd
with whatever came in an IR detector would islolate it from the
antenna in case there really was a nearby lightning strike.