One-Watt Wireless Radio Modem Reaches 40 Miles

maxstreampr wrote in to plug their radio modem. It's the size of a credit card, one watt, and can transmit 40 miles line of sight or 3000 feet indoors. Something about using the AT command set to fire off a command 40 miles through the air amuses me.

Re:Why do we even need the Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth.

Re:Why do we even need the Internet?

[drewbradford]

I'd rather keep mine. The article says that the max speed is 230kbps, and the max sustainable is 115.2 kbps. It won't be too long that you can get that with a cellular modem.

Re:Why do we even need the Internet?

[YankeeInExile]

If you could live with a shared media with a peak throughput of 115 kbits, sure.

I do not want to rain on anyones parade, but ISM band FHSS FSK modems are kinda cool-for-1997 ...

That being said, if maxstream had a reasonable price for onesey twoseys, (Their web site [maxstream.net] has a promotion for what appears to be this series at USD 90 for qty ten) there could be some cool hack value for moderately low speed stuff in portable projects.

Re:Speed

[wg0350]

This is ideal for certain applications. Environmental monitoring and remote metering are two technologies where dial-up modems are still used at speeds similar to this. These are prime candidates for upgrading to wireless. Despite their lack of publicity there are still thousands of low data rate products in use today. You could have 10s - 100s of these devices reporting to one local substation with a broadband connection to a main monitoring station somewhere else in the world.

Not everything has bandwidth requirements comparable to todays average internet connection.

It seems like the selling point of this product is its power consumption. Remote monitoring stations will have very limited power sources. Low power / Long range and high reliability are often more of a concern than high data rate.

Re:Speed: defense of 9600 baud

[G4from128k]

Although 9600 could never handle today's internet and web activities, it is amazingly fast for TTY and CLI type applications. Having started with 110 baud mechanical TTY and 300 baud acoustical coupler modem on a green screen, I well remember my first experience with a 9600 baud hardwired Lear Siegler terminals [old-computers.com] -- WOW very fast.

9600 baud is good enough for modem-to-modem chat, e-mail via pine, text processing with vi or emacs, or almost any *nix command. Thinking about this reminds me of how terribly bloated everything has become with verbose formatting and styling of pages. Pictures may be worth a 1000 words, but they require 10 to 100 times the bandwidth of those words.

Re:Distant Horizon.

[pclminion]

So, what planet is this 40-mile line of sight transmission designed for?

Don't be cynical. I can look out my office window and see a mountain which is 65 miles away from here. The world is not a "totally flat plain or ocean."

Do you live in the Midwest or something? The entire world isn't all like that, you know!

Re:Distant Horizon.

[Zakabog]

Actually it's 40 miles in deep space, but if you've ever visited New York City? We have quite a number of buildings above 100ft. The top of my house is 100 feet from the ground, and I'm on a hill so that helps too.