Marty,

Yes I am drooling over the possibility. Like you I can imagine these
fantastic star networks ringing the big metro areas. I think though
that to be feasible the community needs to look at whats available
off-the-shelf. Obviously if someone technically brilliant can take
Frank's idea and build something that can be cheaply manufactured, that
would be ideal. But Icom's D-Star system is available, and hams are
using 802.11 access points with amplifiers and directional antennas
(www.arrl.org/hsmm/). Maybe a club somewhere has a network like this
already running. It would take a dedicated group of hams with some
fairly serious resources (capital, access to good sites, know-how) to
pull something like this off.

In my area a small group of ATV guys have put up a repeater, and have
established several sites at EOC's, with the goal of providing ATV
"on-demand" to emergency officials. A network project could piggyback
on something like that.

Matt, N3SOZ



Marty Albert wrote:

For the life of me, I can see no reason why Frank's device could not
be
re-designed today to well over 512 Mbps, perhaps very close to
gigabit
speeds. If you make the jump to the new copper solutions for 10 Gbps,
we may
even be able to get close to that...

Imagine a large metropolitan area, like maybe Dallas/Fort Worth,
ringed by
an 8 Gbps nodes with spokes at 8 Gbps "dropping" into and through the
city.
A series of 1 Gbps nodes come off of the spokes to feed into the
neighborhood. In the neighborhoods, picture a bridge node that users
can
connect to at, say, 100 Mbps. Lastly, picture these "City Wheels"
being
connected to other city wheels at 10 Gbps.

Are you drooling yet?

Take Care & 73
--
From The Desk Of
Marty Albert, KC6UFM



"n3soz" wrote in message
oups.com...
I've been a ham for almost eleven years. The year I got started
(1994)
was the same year the Web became open to commercial traffic, and I
guess the decline of packet began around that time. I keep an APRS
snipped for space's sake