On Tue, 05 Jul 2005 08:36:43 -0400, Phoneguy wrote:

I forwarded the photo to an distribution engineer friend of mine at a
nearby power utility. He suggested it could be a remote meter reading
transponder repeater. The technology has numerous ways of doing it, and
low power radio modems are used in some demand metering systems where
individual phone lines are not practical. The transponder gets its power
via the power tap inserted between the lamp body and the light
controlled switch. The nearby low power transponders all report into
their local transponder which in turn relays the reports to a central
gathering station. That's how the system works. Whether or not that is
what it is is yet to be verified.

The antenna's element and coil dimensions look too big to be 2.4GHz. It
does however look right for ISM.

That is a Ricochet Radio.
Part of a Mesh network on 900 Mhz for Internet connectivity.

The company has been about about 7 or 8 years and has had a hard time of
it. I first ran into them in there home city of Seattle in 1998.
In some places they pulled the plug on the network leaving the radios
on the poles. I thought they were out of business.

http://www.ricochet.com/


--
Korbin Dallas
The name was changed to protect the guilty.