Re: [amsat-bb] new digital mode?

[Bruce Bostwick <lihan161051@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'd think it would be best done on a different frequency than 
802.11a,b,g use for commercially available WLAN's so there's no 
question of it being used for non-ham purposes.  It's possible you 
could do something similar to HSMM, but as I recall the jury is still 
out on HSMM since it's pretty easy for a non-ham 802.11 card to get 
onto an HSMM net.

However, using an 802.11b or g card as an IF and shifting through a 
transverter raises some interesting possibilities, especially if 
someone feels like working out something like WDS to build a 
distributed high speed network.  It would be technically difficult 
enough for a non-ham user to hack into that I'd think it wouldn't raise 
the FCC's hackles too much (not nearly as much as HSMM, from what I 
hear) and as long as nobody hooks up a router into the public Internet 
(or filters it in such a way that all traffic over the net is legal, 
meaning NO COMMERCIAL SITES and NO ENCRYPTION among other things) then 
we've probably really got something.

On the other hand, is speed the only measure of our sophistication?  
Sometimes the simplest modes are the best, and you can't get a whole 
lot simpler than CW.  (Granted we don't have many 80 wpm code copying 
folks these days, but when all you have is some 2n2222's, some 
resistors and capacitors, some wire, and a battery, you can at least 
get health and welfare traffic out of a disaster area using QRP 
techniques.)  SSB has its elegant uses as well, as a "magic window" 
into a user selectable part of the RF spectrum that you can stuff 
anything else through that will fit in the transmitter and receiver 
bandwidth.  I don't know about you guys, but I thought PSK31 was a very 
neat trick and it wasn't invented all that long ago.  And what about 
folks who know how to load up anything up to and including a set of 
bedsprings?  There's an art to tuning up an antenna, and it's a lost 
art judging from some of the commercial junk I've seen lately.  That's 
an increasingly valuable skill in this day and age of people who forget 
that the analog stuff has to work before they can even think about 
getting the digital stuff to work on top of it.  In light of that, I 
would say that how many megabits per second we can transmit is almost 
meaningless if it's all we can do, and totally meaningless if we don't 
understand how it's done and how to make it do what we want it to.  
Hams still excel at that.  Don't forget that while your neighbor's 
802.11 WLAN may run circles around your packet rig in terms of data 
rate, your neighbor doesn't have a CLUE how it works or what to do if 
it doesn't work.  (Trust me, I do tech support, they call me when this 
happens.)

The reason so many ham projects seem to be cheap stuff built from Radio 
Shack is that that's the best way to build something if you're going 
directly from first principles.  Sometimes you can find an alternate 
application for something that was already made to do a related job, 
but sometimes you have to start over from the beginning when nobody 
else has invented the thing that does exactly what you want to do.  
This will always be the case with hams.  Sorry for the rant, but I've 
always felt that people who see the crudeness of what hams tend to 
build and don't see the elegance of the concepts behind those projects 
are often missing the most basic aspects of the ham-nature.  I elmer 
when possible, but it's hard to fight that tide by myself ..

On Friday, Sep 17, 2004, at 12:21 US/Central, Freeman P. Pascal IV 
wrote:

> Spot on!
>
> Here's a crazy idea.  Why can't we take the tech that is used for WIFI
> and pass it through a satellite to get 10Mb (802.11g) or 54Mb (802.11b)
> throughput?  I have to believe that some of this R&D and hardware could
> be put to better use on systems with better noise and gain figures than
> consumer wireless networking.
>
> What are the limitations of passing this through a satellite?
>
> -Freeman, N5FFP (asking a stupid question)
>
           --... ...-- -.. . -. ..... ...- -...
                   Bruce Bostwick N5VB
----
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