One-Watt Wireless Radio Modem Reaches 40 Miles 240
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.
what about when you go under a bridge? (Score:3, Interesting)
What kind of antenna?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Speed (Score:5, Interesting)
9600 baud is pretty darn slow, even with compresion.
MaxStream RF modem (Score:3, Interesting)
wow, I learn something new everyday (Score:3, Interesting)
CBSD
RF distance can be surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:what about when you go under a bridge? (Score:4, Interesting)
It comes in great on my car, but hardly at all on any of my other radios. Of course, there are a few spots I avoid because they kill the reception. I'll even drive five miles out of the way just to avoid that patch.
In the army (in Finland) (Score:4, Interesting)
no time penalty (Score:5, Interesting)
No time penalty is incurred during AES encryption or decryption.
That's pretty interesting. Perhaps they meant to say that there is no additional processing overhead beyond that which is introduced by performing the full number of rounds for a 256 bit key in hardware.
It seems you still need a shared secret. I assume it isn't doing any authenticated Diffie-Hellman to establish a session key.
Sorry, it's just kind of irritating when you hear things like "security through encryption." Great. You get integrity protection and data confidentialy while the data is in trasit. There are many other opportunities for an attacker to get your data besides when it's flying around in mid-air.
umm, line of site at 40 miles? (Score:2, Interesting)
1000 Miles per watt award (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not very impressive (Score:4, Interesting)
* Up to 3000 feet range (Indoor/Urban environments, @9600 RF data rate)
We're talking about this thing for what reason?
CmdrTaco, please, drink some Jolt and wake up. That's twice in one day you've made me want to smack you around for wasting my time. 9600 baud? Really, why would we want to use this?
To compare this to 802.11b, they have what looks like a version [maxstream.net] that operates in the 2.4GHz band, guess what? 1500ft range, at 9600 baud.
While I'll admit this thing might have some very specific uses, like remote data collection where you don't have a lot of data, but you want it delivered at regular intervals over a distance where it'd be hard to put in relays or run a real link... but the damn thing costs more than $400 [google.com], so if you *can* use 802.11g instead, you'll probably want to!
Distant Horizon. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not very impressive (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ad Dot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Friends of SCO (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And I'm getting 14,400 bps on my HSCSD mobile (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:1000 Miles per watt award (Score:3, Interesting)
packetradio.com [packetradio.com]
I work PSK31 occasionally and have worked Europe easily with 50W or less. It's not magic, and the band conditions are horrid as we're in a soloar minimum. If i get up early enough I bet i could work Asia. Not bad for being in southeast Arkansas.
I can't wait in a few years when the sunspot cycle is on the way up again and we're able to work across the world on 5W or less easily.
PSK31 is a fantastic mode to work and it's easy to pick up DX contacts.
KD5ZEF
Some substance, more hype, a few uses..... (Score:3, Interesting)
I do wish they would standardise on frequency allocations worldwide, as I live in the UK and might have a use for one of these, as it might be cheaper than what we have, the 458MHz band where things like this have been around for a long time, similar power, same baud rate, similar range with a directional antenna. I note that this one seems to be specified with a 4dB external antenna gain. Now that would be about a 4 element yagi, or a helix or dish, but maybe more as you would have a lot of attenuation in the coax unless it was very short, so the whole package is actually not so small as it seems.
But we have seen better than this on Slashdot, not so many weeks ago someone had fitted up dish antennae to a standard WiFi card IIRC, and were getting better range on less power (100mW?), and very much greater bandwidth, but of course very directional. That too ought to be allowed worldwide but probably is not.
This thing is not by any means a technical breakthrough, except possibly in terms of power efficiency, and even there I think the improvement is marginal.