On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 20:47:42 -0800, Dana H. Myers wrote:

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

Cool! Thanks for the tip. I know I've seen references to these devices
in the Linux kernel menu config. I see that my Debian installation has a
wavelan module so that hardware is probably supported. I'll have to keep
an eye out at the next hamfest.

Thanks!

73, de Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds,
the pessimist fears this is true."