poptones's Journal: Your Twenty Minutes Are Up

After making this comment in a discussion on digital radio I have decided I finally have something to write about in my journal. See, I live way out in the sticks (well, fairly much anyway) and I've been choking without broadband since I left LA. I had the intention of wiring this place for nearly three years now, but there are so many practical considerations (hills, scads of trees, intense humidity and frequent violent storms) 802.xx communication is pretty much useless for anything other than home networking.

The last couple of weeks I've been reading up on Gnu radio and the planned peripherals, and I do believe this project could be just the ticket - not only here, but in thousands of villages across the world. Once a standard, low cost platform could be built it would be fairly easy for community projects to make use of this open technology with the (hopeful) result of rapidly advancing development of a new generation of "wireless."

Or maybe it's just nostalgia. I grew up with radio -hanging around the local college station, chatting on the CB (yes, I'm of that era) and, later, actually working as a hired gun doing field engineering on my associate's first class tag. I've not been able to stand listening to the radio for years now because of what's become of the broadcast band (and because CB is just lame and the band is so full of pirates running KW rigs it's all but useless to anyone not gripped with DX fever). But this - applying to personal networking all the wonderful technology made extremely affordable by a world filled with cellphones and wireless NICs... well, I think it's time to go request some new samples from Maxim

Oh, Dominique...