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Hardware

Aussies Put Old Pay-TV Dishes To Use -- As A LAN 159

Posted by timothy from the that's-not-a-wireless-card dept.
Insane Hardware writes: "If you thought the olympic show the Aussie's put on was pretty tops, then this will blow your socks off. Insane Hardware sends in word about a group of people in the country's capital, Canberra (just south of Sydney), who are setting up a wireless air network for game play amoungst many other things (pr0n trading???). So how are these guys doing it and doing it cheaply? Well they are using satellite dishes from an old defunct Pay-TV system Australia had some years back called Galaxy, and are using some standard old full-length WaveLAN ISA cards which operate in the 2.4GHz range to hook up to these ol dishes. " (More below.)

Mr. Hardware continues: "Although not the best speeds, approximately 2Mbps with a 2.2ms round trip latency isn't too shabby when you consider the cost and implementation of this. Hell, you can even learn how to make a reciever dish at this site! So how is it powered? Linux of course! Check out www.air.net.au for more info."

Check out the mailing list archives to see how much progress they've made, too -- perhaps some friendly (and entrepreneurial) Slashdot reader can hook a few Canberrans up with wireless cards for cheaper than they can get them down there?
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Aussies Put Old Pay-TV Dishes To Use -- As A LAN More

Aussies Put Old Pay-TV Dishes To Use -- As A LAN

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  • Re:Necessary to mention Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yer I saw that. The article is infact on Air.net.au [air.net.au]. It has some excellent info on it. Im interested in trying something like this, however I am unsure about the FFC rules and regulations for 2.4GHz operation. Isn't that "free" man's territory?
  • I'm reading this as they're using the old dishes as high-gain antennas for their own point-to-point network.

    John

  • How do you pronounce XXXX?
  • four-ecks
  • Considering that you can buy Melbourne Bitter in Victoria as well, I doubt that this is true. They might have started bringing it to Sydney to combat Tooheys "Sydney Bitter" (which was a nice beer, but they kept changing the recipe until it ended up tasting of sump-oil).
  • If Canberra is too cold for you, go stand in front of one of these 2.4GHz dishes :)
  • Actually, it looks like they are just using the antennas from the defunct TV service, not the satelites.

    In fact, if you read their site, they are using home-made and other types of antennas as well.

  • I live in Sydney, and on the way back from a recent skiing trip we passed through Canberra. It takes all of 5 mins to drive from one end to the other. Canberra is like a country town, and since the project is specified at "North Canberra" I'm wondering why they didn't use normal cables ;) I can see why /. called it a "LAN" rather than "WAN" though...
  • Really? I never knew that... guess that explains it all.

    Still, I can't quite see myself drinking Crownies out of a blue can..

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • check out SeattleWireless [seattlewireless.net].



    They are using the canberra plans to make helical antennae and set up a city-wide wireless network.


    for free

  • you dont need to hack into the airport. just unscrew it and plug in an antenna. it's an orinocco card and it has an antenna jack built in.
  • PS for those who haven't visited us here, Canberra is not that small. And while this project is based in North Canberra, there are people attempting to achieve the same thing in South Canberra. It would be difficult to link the two networks wirelessly as there is a fair distance between the sites at North and South Canberra.
  • Ahhh, Cascade Premium.... mmmmm...
    Another great one is J.Boags & Sons Premium...

    Funnily enough, both are Tasmania... Must be the clean fresh water we have down here!
  • The Galaxy "satellite" dishes didn't point at a satellite either. They pointed at a local transmission tower

    I think you may be confusing the two Galaxy dishes. The genuine satellite service used a solid, offset parabolic dish (so that the feedhorn doesn't obstruct the dish), which was pointed at one of the Aussat satellites (IIRC.) The microwave service used a wire mesh "dish" pointed at a base station. The article refers to "Galaxy TV antennas" which sounds more like the microwave antenna.

  • Just south of Sydney is.....Wollongong!

    I haven't been to the 'gong for a while, but it most definetely is not our nations captial! I thought Canberra was mostly west from Sydney. Where's my map...

    Nitpick: *sigh* The only place here in Oz that most people know about is the now cliched "Sydney, Australia". Canberra would be better described as "central NSW, where it's bloody cold and only fat-cat pollie's want to stay" :)

  • great fun - we used a repeater based wavelan setup to reach a laptop attached to a camera mounted on a cow... http://cowcam.co.uk/
  • The Australian Communications Authority (ACA) and the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA)are going to come down on this like a tonne of bricks.

    The Government here regards spectrum as its own asset not as a community asset to be regulated for the benefit of all.

    They charge BIG dollars for the right to do this kind of thing in "THEIR" spectrum.

    It sucks but thats how the system works.

  • The Lopht peeps were setting up something similar as well, and there are quite a few others around as well.

    There was an article at technocrat.net about it, but the search seems to be down so can't find it now, also possibly it was posted on /.?

    Nice if someone could set up a group/site/thing to coordinate things a bit more, save running into IP conflicts (quite a few seem to be going for IPV6) if they get linked together (even if only tunneled through the internet) and to get some linking going of cos :).

  • Don't let yourself get caught :)

    And with satellite dishes (which transmit directionally), this isn't even too hard to accomplish.
    Unless someone is that stupid to point his antenna directly at some feds, they won't receive the signal, and everything is fine.

    I guess something like that could even be used as some semisecure, because listening in ("wire"-tapping) is kinda impossible if you're not exactly between the sending and the receiving antenna.
  • So what about all those irridium sattelites? Or have they burned up already? :) If not, well, this may be a good "cheap" network in the sky.

  • Re:Pretty cool stuff. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm in NYC (Manhattan and Brooklyn), and would love to see a free wireless service. I'd be willing to set up base in Brooklyn and maybe in Manhattan. I currently have 4 WebGear cards running at home in my LAN. I have also have CDPD service from Verizon at $40/month. It would be a pipe dream if I can dump them and get higher speed service for no cost...
  • I have an old Bell Expressvu dish kickin around (with the old hardware before the upgrade to the new satellite) anyone get it working with one of these? How about dishes from other vendors? For some reason I cannot load the link so maybe that info is on thier site?

    This could be a good way for people in the country to get higher speed net access. If you can find a near-by friend with high-speed access that is.
  • Or it could be the classic:

    "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain."

    or something like that.

  • Sounds like.. (Score:3)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @07:36AM (#731863)
    They are simply using the dishes as 2.4Ghz directional antennas.

    Sounds cool, right? Might want to check local regulations for the 2.4Ghz ISM band. You can only have so much gain for so much power... if you try this in the US you might be violating FCC.
  • Have a look at consume.net [consume.net] for a similar project that's underway in London, the difference being that it's being designed as a bandwidth sharing scheme so that packets from wireless devices can be forwarded to the general Internet using routers attached to ubiquitous wireless basestations.
  • hahaha well I am sure the CUB really does not give a shit
  • Link to the Lopht's Guerrilla net [205.159.169.11] mentioned above.
  • *"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police' is currently under review by the Axiom Review Boa*

    Those bloody snakes get everywhere don't they :)

  • Yes Canberrans... No not Canberries.

    While we are firm and juicy, we only turn red when we get too much sun.

  • Ha! How about DSL Installs that arn't possible..
    I asked Tellus and they basically said:
    "The phone lines in that area are so crappy, Its
    a wonder that your phone even works."

    So I went and got cable. and with 200kbps average
    I'm happy. (sometimes up to 300kbps)
  • Surely they call themselves "Canberries"...
    --
  • Well, as the guy above posted there is consume.net in London, Edinburgh and Stirling could be good as well as they are on hills so line of sight can be good.

    As for the dishes, haven't been recently, but I'd guess the old non digital ones are probably being given away at most of the auctions in the country.

    *mirroring stuff like DVD decryption software maybe* and of course now with all this censorware and government pressure pr0n is under threat at well, should get mirroring all you can find right now, umm for political purposes of course...

  • Sounds really nice. A good solution for cities. Does it have a gateway to the net at large? If so, when is one coming to New York, and where do I sign up?
  • I would be thrilled to have wireless access via a system like that but I don't think that this will ever happen.
  • Or of course you are stupid enough to let it become the talk of the net with a huge peice in slashdot.

    I think the cat is out of the bag and if there is a problem it will soon become apparent.

  • I wonder what the FCC would say about this if someone did it in the US? The 2.4 Ghz stuff wouldn't be a big deal I guess, but the propagation of the signal may... I dunno, what do you think?

    (Just thinking out loud...)

    / k.d / earth trickle / Monkeys vs. Robots Films [hypermart.net] /

  • In Aussi-land, where it's good weather all the time, you might get away with this. In some countries in europe, which we will not mention by name, it is always raining and as such a hell of a lot less fun playing around with satellite dishes outside.
  • If you can make a wireless LAN out of old satellite dishes, then you can surely transmit satellite TV from them also, can't you?

  • FCC rules on 2.4 Ghz (Score:3)

    by rho ( 6063 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @07:37AM (#731878) Journal

    There's an EETimes article about it here [eetimes.com]. To sum up:

    It allows frequency-hopping signals in the 2.4-GHz band to operate at 1, 3 or 5 MHz, with at least 15 non-overlapping channels spread out over a total span of 75 MHz. The average time of occupancy on any frequency shall not be greater than 0.4 seconds, within a 30-second period. The maximum output power is 125 mW at 5 MHz, vs. the 200 mW the HomeRF group had requested.

    This mostly concerns the battle between HomeRF and 802.11, but does give some good info.

  • Sorry, I completely disagree with you.

    I prefer wireless linux-driven network information over the repetitive mega-cool/atari-handheld stuff.

    Gee, Slashdot posting things that are not incredibly interesting for every single reader?

    Wah.

    The Slashdot guys do a decent job of getting interesting stuff - no filter is perfect.

    cat Flame.didntmeanto > /dev/null

    Ok, so some filters are perfect.
  • "if Joe Q. Schmuck's shoelace has Linux running on a 2" chip"

    ummm.. id want THAT posted....

    simple.

    ./vanguard
  • Actually.. it isn't directly related to range.
    Directional antennas will let you go quite some distance with standard 2.4Ghz stuff, still within regulations. We've set up some 18 and 19 km links using yagi and sectoral antennas. Of course, caluclations were done to make sure we didn't exceed the acceptable limits.
  • Does anyone remember Radiomodems

    1) what happed to them

    2) could a radio modem be hocked up to a wireless eithernet device

    3) is that what these people have done? Or are they using the dishes as point to point microwave transmiters

    Casue I am a little confused here.
  • Australian porn is some of the best!
    I did lots of research into this while in college.
    I sure wish they set up a short-wave version of this system, so I could continue my research here in the States.

    The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196

  • A use for old satellites, eh? Now if only we had some unused satellites that covered a large percentage of the planet and were planned to be deorbitted just to waste about a billion dollars of technology for fun... ...but we don't have anything like that, right?

  • Airlink (Score:1)

    by Eck ( 2901 )
    This looks like the Internet connectivity offered in Edmonton, Alberta (and elsewhere) by OA Net [oanet.com], where I work. The Airlink service has been a big seller, largely because DSL installs take so fscking long.
  • I looked at the IP registry [air.net.au] and I noticed that while they are using one of the officially unassigned networks (192.168.x.x), they are assigning it to their members (currently 25 entries in this list) in class C chunks. Obviously they aren't planning on more than 250 or so members. They probably should have used the 10.x.x.x range, but maybe this type of project doesn't scale well past 250 or so sites per wireless network.

    But isn't this kind of thing what gave Fidonet such growing pains? The original Fidonet address spec was two 16 bit integers, but then they had to add zones in front, and they wanted non-dialable client nodes, so points were tacked to the end. Some software never properly supported zones, much less points. (And some TCP/IP software still doesn't support variable length bit masks either.) At least with a full class C per site, they don't have to worry about the "point problem".

  • dont give all those canberries all the credit, cause it isnt just them setting it up. Adelaide, Melbourne and the entire state of tasmania (the one at the bottom, that always gets left off the maps are also setting up similar things. Finally, we australians have had an idea before the americans! too bad about the FCC... HAHAHAHA

    go to http://www.adelaide.air.net.au for news on our exploits or http://www.tas.air.net for tasmanian info. Melbourne doesnt have a site yet.

  • I live in Canberra, and while I'm not a part of the geek scene, a lot of my mates are (my copy of mirc is still zipped). If somebody wanted to hassle some of the geeks involved, you can bet you'll find them at #canberra on the local efnet (no, no idea what that is). But what I can tell you is, this is soooooooo far from news it's not funny, this project has been underway for at least a year or two. I used to be interested, but it's just not that great, and afaik most of the people involved are in belconnen and you need to be within x kilometres (about 2.5???) to use it.

    Gfunk
  • I'm speaking as someone in Canberra involved in this. It started as a fun hack hobby of people in the Canberra Linux Users Group [clug.org.au] but the mailing list has people from other states involved as well. Obviously there's no interstate connection since the cards don't transmit with enough power to stretch the 400+ Km to our friends in Sydney or 800+ km to our friends in Melbourne, and further.

    Anyway, there's not even 250 people in the CLUG, let alone doing the WaveLAN thing, so this limit isn't as silly as it sounds. We're not worried about scalability since there's currently more than enough and if the limit is hit, then shock horror we can vi a file and use the 10.0.0.0 network instead. That's enough IP's for every man, woman, child, dog and refrigerator in the territory with room to spare (heck, 256^3 is almost enough for the population of the country).

    The galaxy antennas have worked mostly well though some people have been having more luck with custom helicals (which is also good since the galaxy ones are rare, anyway it's more fun to build your own)

    One big problem we have at the moment is between the north and south side is a fair bit of non-residential area (read: parks, public land, parliament house, etc) a wideish lake, and a mountain - which is making a north-south link impossible due to the short range of the cards. The guys north-side (the main instigators) have been having more luck as the terrain south-side messes with LOS more.

    Anyway its a lot of fun and I encourage other people who like hacking and get bored with ethernet networks to get involved in something similar in your area. We've already got a splinter group iirc which are using a different card which has a longer range and more bandwidth, and works with modern hardware (the main problem with the wavelan cards imho - full-length 8-bit ISA)
    --
    Matt

  • If you want a good Australian beer try Cascade Premium, and if you want the beer that we all drink get VB or XXXX. They won't win any competitions but they do the job, and don't completely taste like piss.

    Cascade is a good beer, as is anything by Coopers and James Boag. Unfortuantely, VB and XXXX do taste completely like piss.... Toohey's Old & and Toohey's New aren't too bad if you're stuck in Sydney, though.

    The main reason VB sells so well in Victoria and XXXX in Queensland is saturation marketing of their home turf.
  • 6.25 Australian dollars = 3.53 US dollars Back in kentucky we call that a 12 pack of Old Millwakuee (sp?), and when I was in minnesota for a year they called it pig's eye.
  • heheh - on http://www.tas.air.net.au:

    "website coming back again soon..."

    oh well...

    All of Tasmania? That'd be nice.. but the place is 400km's from one corner to the other. At the moment it is focused on the biggest cities Hobart (mainly western shore) and Launceston.

    And seeing as our site is so non-existant - please email the list at wireless@taslug.org.au, or look in IRC at irc.slashnet.org #vortex (and msg acb and call him a whore)
  • Wait a minute...
    Look at Elle McPherson (sp?).

    --Ben
  • Of course all Slashdot readers should remember that the FCC has no authority in Australia, so this only applies to people trying to do the same thing in the US.
  • I've got an old Primestar dish taking up space in my patio (when they "upgraded" me to DirecTV they didn't take it). I wonder if anything can be done like that with old Primestar dishes.
  • Funnily enough, Australians don't drink fosters.I am Australian and have lived/been to all of the major cities and regional centres and not once have I seen anyone (with the exception of a few tourists) drink fosters.
    In fact most of the pubs in Sydney don't have it. Fosters was labeled as piss by Australians a long time ago, so they decided to spend a pretty penny on international marketing to get everyone else to drink it.

    If you want a good Australian beer try Cascade Premium, and if you want the beer that we all drink get VB or XXXX. They won't win any competitions but they do the job, and don't completely taste like piss.

    In regards to the wireless lan I am interested as too whether our FCC will nab them for it.

    Cheers :)

    Now where did I leave the keys to my kangaroo?
  • yeah- I've used the similar service in Santa Fe, with an antenna mounted on my roof- the article opens up new possibilities of taking it mobile, though- does one need line of sight to the antenna?

  • What? I thought "as USA goes, as does the rest of the world!"?

    Just kidding -- good point. Shoulda added that.

  • um... wouldn't that be _w_an? notmally i wouldn't be that picky, but this is slashdot afterall.
  • yep, that'd be correct :>

    we are slowly working on getting the site back up.

    The major problems we have at the moment are as Chuq says, the area to cover is massive - and capital here is minimal, so if anyone would like to donate to a good cause (hell, we'll even incorporate ourselves especially so you know you aren't being ripped off) then we'll love you for ever :>

  • FCC? (Score:1)

    by tooth ( 111958 )
    I seem to be seeing lots of questions about the FCC, but in .au it's the SMA (spectrum managment athourity) that handles this (same thing, just different letters). I have no idea on broadcast rules in .au, maybe there are some amatuer radio people here that can explain it better?
  • Galaxy wasn't a satellite system. It was a surface pay TV system based on microwave transmissions from Telstra tower on black mountain.

    All that the air.net.au people are using are the now disused microwave antennas - they can often be collected free from people who used to have Galaxy. That makes a very cheap way of getting an ~18dBi antenna.
  • Actually the Galaxy antennas in question do include a downconverter/preamplifier which needs to be ripped out before they can be used for transmission.
  • Not really. In order to get the distances, you need to use fairly highly directional antennas. So the restaurant would have to be very well located, and then you'd have to get your dish in to line of sight of another antenna and carefully line it up.

  • My bad. I had Galaxy for six months before cancelling the service. I must have had the wire mesh microwave type because my "dish" (a tiny little thing) was aimed directly at Telstra Tower. I didn't realise there was a second type of Galaxy dish built for satellite reception.

  • I didn't realise people really drunk XXXX, except in rural Queensland?

    Kinda like the old joke: Why do they call it XXXX?

    Because Queenslanders can't spell Beer. :)

  • Not that it would matter whether the FCC allowed it or not, since the FCC HAS NO AUTHORITY OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES. Fucking insular Americans.

  • Doesn't the statistic go that the top selling beer in London is Fosters?

    I agree that no Australian in their right mind would drink Fosters. During the Olympics here in Sydney they had a massive marketing blitz - including a vain effort to boost sales - a buy-one-fosters-get-another-free promotion.

    They couldn't even give the stuff away...

    Still they had a half-decent ad campaign [ibelieve.com.au] during the olympics.

    Another beer urban legend is that CUB [cub.com.au] introduced Melbourne Bitter into NSW after shifting the brewing of NSW-distro Victoria Bitter to Sydney. Seems everyone noticed the taste change when they stopped using water from the Yarra and used Sydney tap water instead... ie. Melbourne Bitter is the old VB brewed in Melbourne. Anyone confirm?

  • Somewhat "offtopic", but not really, has anyone tried the solution Dell offers for wireless? I bought a laptop from them a few days ago and decided to opt for their wireless cards and base station. Thank god for payment plans.

    Is it is as good as Airport?

  • There must be a lot of unused BSB satellite dishes kicking around the UK worth practically zip by now Also with people dumping their old sky dishes for 'digi dishes' for sky digital pretty soon their will be a lot of old sky dishes going cheap Sod the weather, surely it would be worth setting up a network live this just for gaming and mirroring stuff like DVD decryption software maybe ?...
  • I read recently during the pre-Olympic hype that Fosters only has something like 2% of the beer market in Australia. Fosters was also actually started by 2 Americans who opened a brewery in Australia.

  • Questions, questions, too many questions! (Score:4)

    by Mikeytsi ( 186271 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @08:51AM (#731913) Journal
    Since there's a whole bunch of questions on this, and I've got some experience in this arena, I'll impart some of my knowledge.

    No, it's not illegal. The 2.4Ghz band is a public band, so it's not tightly regulated by the FCC. It's a real pain in the ass when you've got a whole bunch of people running in the frequency range in the same area though,... (Guess how I know this?)

    Provided you could get a signal, you'd be able to connect to the network from anywhere. All you need is a wireless ethernet card, and the information on how to connect to the network. (I currently have two different wireless PCMCIA cards, and should be getting a third soon). An actual "dish" is not necessary.

    "Rain Fade" isn't really an issue, unless you're talking HEAVY rain. Rain Fade is a lot more of a problem when you're actually going through the cloud cover (a-la Satellite). The wireless stuff they're doing doesn't work that way.

    That about covers it. BTW, the company that I work for is getting into this technology REALLY heavy in the US. Especially since Cisco bought Aironet, which has a wirless system that communicates at 11Mbps. That's pretty damn fast for radio, people.
  • Actually (IIRC) The 2.4GHz spectrum slice is globally unregulated -- anyone can use it for whatever they want to use it for. Of course this means you can't complain to the FCC (or it's equivilent) if somebody else is causing interference on that frequency. There are a bunch of unregulated (or semi-regulated) frequencies that can be used for consumer products. The frequencies used by cordless (handset) phones are one example; WaveLAN is another. Some of these frequencies are totally fair game; others have a cap on the amount any one station can broadcast (Like CB radio, which is limited to 3 watts, IIRC).

  • It most certainly is point to point. There's no way you'd get the distances covered here with omnidirectional within the legal power limits. The Galaxy antennas aren't "satellite dishes" as such (Galaxy was a surface system), just directional microwave antennas.
  • Seeing as nobody seems to have mentioned it, there's a similar initiative being started by consume.net [consume.net], aiming to do much the same thing around London in the UK. The first masts are going up at the moment, and apparently you can get quite a good range from the `Sarah Lee antenna', i.e. made out of a cake tin and coathangers :-) Maybe somebody who's actually used one can fill me in here, but the mention of it on the mailing list made me laugh.

  • Re:Pretty cool stuff. (Score:3)

    by nathanh ( 1214 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @08:10AM (#731935) Homepage

    You don't need an actual satellite. You just use satellite dishes. The dishes point at each other. They don't point into the skies. They're all pointing at somebody elses dish nearby.

    The Galaxy "satellite" dishes didn't point at a satellite either. They pointed at a local transmission tower (Telstra Tower, or as all the locals call it, Black Mountain Tower).

  • I didn't realise people really drunk XXXX, except in rural Queensland?

    For Australians in the UK (such as myself), here's some happy news: VB distribution seems to be improving. It's imported from Oz, and Sainsburys is stocking it (at some stores in London, at any rate) at a reasonable price.

    Woo!

    The pubs i've seen it in seem to charge about £2.50 (~AUS$6.25) for a can...

    ...j
  • That's it. "True mobile". Hopefully it'll be worth the purchase.

    It should also be interesting to see if I can get it to play nicely with Linux. I'll keep a Windows 98 partition around just in case.

  • It probably is Airport, which is all still Lucent gear, from what I have read.
  • www.tele2.co.uk

  • Re:This uses satellite DISHES people, not satellit (Score:3)

    by Tassach ( 137772 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @09:31AM (#731949)
    An antenna dosn't really do anything by itself. It all depends what you hook up to it. If you connect a receiver to an antenna, all you can do is recieve stuff. If you hook a tranciever up to it, you can transmit & receive.

    There's no real technical difference between the antenna a radio station uses to broadcast it's signal and the antenna on your car that you use to pick up that signal. The difference between a dish antenna and a linear antenna is that the dish is fairly directional whereas the linear antenna is omnidirectional.

  • Can this network be accessed with a portable dish? Sit in an outdoor cafe, setup your laptop and a collapsible 1 meter dish and surf at some decent speeds. And no mobile phone charges. Man, I'd pay for that.

    Besides, how cool would it be to be sitting in a restaurant with a satellite dish?

  • I'll probably get Troll -1, or flamed for saying this, but does anyone really care about the "oh, and it runs on Linux!" tagline lately? It's getting to the point where if Joe Q. Schmuck's shoelace has Linux running on a 2" chip that suddenly this is a Slashdot-worthy article.. This is not news for nerd.. It's news for lamers. Now if you're going to put up a tutorial on writing a driver for this dinky little device, or one of the "making-of" type pages (as with the mega-cooled systems, the atari-handheld thing, etc), then I don't mind. But can we stop with the, "OOOOH! The article mentions the letters l-i-n-u-x in succession, let's post the sucker!!" stories? Just my thoughts
  • This type of system would require an existing Satelite system, such as "Galaxy." Other cities could put a satelite up simply for this purpose, but that would take away the economics of it all.

    Would be much cheaper to run digital lines (phone/cable), and then you wouldn't have to have a sat-dish.

    But it's still cool, just doesn't make sense in somewhere like NYC.

    Might work in rural areas though, they usually have sat-dishes already (for TV) and with the new dishes most places in hicksvilles have a large unused dish and a smaller one for TV.

    Devil Ducky

  • Fosters... (Score:4)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @07:11AM (#731957) Homepage Journal
    A scene of a man eating a steak, and hooking an old dish into his 8088 computer
    An aussie voice with aussie accent: Local area network

    A can of fosters smacking the floor...
    An aussie voice with aussie accent: Beer... Fosters... Australian for beer.


    -- Don't you hate it when people comment on other people's .sigs??
  • I don't know about Australia, but here in the US there are strict limits on what you can do with te 2.4GHz band, including rather low caps on the total transmitting power which limits the range of any sort of home network.
    Does anyone with experiance in the aussie equivelent of the FCC have any insight into this?
    Oh, and the link in the article should point to www.air.net.au [air.net.au].
  • If you can make a wireless LAN out of old satellite dishes, then you can surely transmit satellite TV from them also, can't you?

    You can beam it into another user's satellite receiver, if he happens to be pointing at you (unlikely) or you're right off the edge of his dish (where most parabolic reflector antennas have a minor lobe.)

    You'd have a tough time uplinking to the satellite. I understand the receivers are at a very different frequency from what the little piepans handle.

  • This uses satellite DISHES people, not satellites (Score:3)

    by Tassach ( 137772 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @08:42AM (#731965)
    Did everyone here fail 3rd grade reading comprehension?

    The network described in the article uses WaveLAN cards connected to old dish antennas. You could do the same thing with just about any other parabolic antenna you might have access to (DirecTV, anyone?). At no time does the signal bounce off a satellite -- this is all line-of-sight between two or more ground-based nodes.

    Please stop talking about Iridium or anything else in orbit. You are only making a fool of yourself by doing so.

  • I would suggest a Amateur radio license

    And I would recomend that the hams leave this one alone. You see, if it takes a ham license to run the transmitter, then non-hams can't legally join the fun.

    So, if someone wants to play with this, go read Part 15 of the FCC regulations ("License-free operation and frequencies") and do it there. Legally unlicensed and available to everyone who wants to play.
  • Canberra has also been rolling out 'high capacity optic fibres to within 300 metres of individual homes. The last segment of the connection to the home consists of copper wires, similar to those used in office local area networks. The total bandwidth to every home is a massive 51mbps downstream and 1.6mbps upstream.' I think this is supposed to be a world first. I'm sure this must have already been covered. http://www.csu.edu.au/special/raiss99/papers/cvivi an/
  • Courtesy of the rock-solid and easy-to-setup Apple AirPort.. I have an Orinoco (nee WaveLAN) board in my W2k laptop (ProntoEdit and the TrueSync on my fone only work with Win32 :() and my signal is outstanding..

    At work we demo'd a point2point wireless installation between 2 buildings using 14dB Yagi directional antennae. Solid connection even without direct line of sight (a couple of buildings in the way).. Very impressed..

    Now I just have to get a nice amplified omnidirecitonal antenna for my apt (and hack into the airport to solder the antenna connection ;) so I can compute out on the shared patio..

    Your Working Boy,

  • Necessary to mention Linux (Score:4)

    by Fervent ( 178271 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @07:15AM (#731978)
    Not to be hypocritical, but did the poster just mention the word "Linux" to get the article accepted more easily? I would have thought the hardware news would've carried on its own.

  • Re:Is this even legal? (Score:3)

    by driftingwalrus ( 203255 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @07:18AM (#731979) Homepage
    To my understanding, the limits are only on the outer edges of the band.

    2.4GHz is an ISM band(Industry, Science, Medical), so it gets used by microwaves, X-Ray machines, etc. It's not a licensed band, and is mostly kept open for noise generated by these devices.

  • Academical and Research Network in Lithuania (LITNET) is widely using wavelan technology. For example radio network covers entire Vilnius city (it's our capital with ~700'000 population).

    Check out the map of this network (I'm very lucky to live on one of those small red dots :)). We've recently upgraded most of our wavelans in Vilnius from 2mbit/s to 10mbit/s. It's a pitty this network has only 2mbit connection to the world. [www.lema.lt]

    If you wish to learn more about technology we use go here [www.lema.lt], to learn more about Litnet go here [litnet.lt]

  • This type of system would require an existing Satelite system, such as "Galaxy."

    More precisely, this type of system would require a defunct Satelite system, such as "Galaxy". Or a hardware hacker willing to show you how to make a 2.4GHz antenna.
    --

  • They're already sort of doing this in the US (Score:4)

    by blazer1024 ( 72405 ) on Wednesday October 04, 2000 @07:24AM (#731995)
    Here in New Mexico, a company called LoboNet [lobo.net] uses 2.4GHz LAN/WAN radios from BreezeCOM [breezecom.com] with outdoor antennas to businesses in the more rural areas. (Near Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but too far for DSL or ISDN)

    They have around a dozen customers, and there's no problem with the FCC, since the 2.4GHz spectrum is an non-license spectrum. As far as power levels go, I don't know. But it works quite nicely.

    (Although for some reason LoboNet doesn't have any mention of it on their site... strange. But I know it's there! Maybe there's some mention at the Integrity Networking Solutions [integrityns.com] site, since many of the wireless networking customers go through them.)
  • 2.4GHz is the assigned band for wireless networking in the UK and assumes a mean range per device of about 300 metres. By extension it's probably the same in Australia.
  • Or a software hacker willing to show you how to make a working satellite system defunct!

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