Nate Bargmann wrote:

Personally, I would like to be able to assemble a medium speed LAN
capable of 128k to 384k speeds running in the 900 MHz band. I was piqued
by the ZigBee announcement yesterday on Slashdot where it was mentioned
that one of the bands to be used is 902 to 928 MHz @ 250 kbps. Adapting
such a technology to ham radio would be cool. Out here in the sticks we
would gladly trade down the bandwidth for the extra range we could achieve
on 900 MHz over 2.4 GHz.

Keep your eyes peeled for AT&T/NCR WaveLAN 915 hardware.
They made ISA cards and PC-Cards, and these were basically
an Intel Ethernet controller glued to a 2Mbps 915MHz DSSS
radio, running around +24dBm (250mw).

The ISA Card used an external antenna, while the PC-Card
had an "antenna module" which was actually the radio.

Though it's now quite difficult to find motherboards
with ISA slots, the ISA card is pretty interesting from
an experimentation point of view - you have access to the
barebones hardware and can tinker with the protocol. The
Ethernet controller on the ISA card was an 82586, the
controller in the PC-Card was a much simpler Intel controller,
the part number escapes me. In 1995, I developed drivers
for Solaris x86 for both of those cards and was quite
happy with the performance.

I recall that BSD and Linux had drivers for these cards,
so you could probably get started without much in the way
of documentation.

I never did any long-range outdoor linking with WaveLAN 915,
but I did read reports of 5-10 mile point-to-point links
done with directional antennas. I've done 12 miles with
802.11b on 2.4GHz (under Part 15 rules), so 10 miles with
this WaveLAN gear sounds reasonable.

Cheers -
Dana K6JQ