roll your own wireless (was [geeks] Roll your own DSL)

[Peter L. Wargo]

On Tue, 14 Aug 2001, Reagen B . Ward wrote:

> You mean like the one where the guys built 2way line-of-sight links
> using old Primestar dishes and soup cans?  Think that was on Slashdot.
> I'm sure the commenters found a way to say that it was wrong because it
> wasn't GPL, because RMS didn't use it, because it somehow involved KDE,
> and that it was too slow for a Beowulf interconnect.

Ya know, a good friend of mine inherited and improved upon a wireless
system that a common friend designed back in the late 80's - it worked
using two wireless lan cards, a pair of custom antennas, and two 286's
running the Clarkson packet drivers as routers.  It worked at T1 speeds
at almost three miles.

A couple of years ago, Matt lent me the system to bridge NCGR's two
"closer" buildings together while we moved. (What a setup - data center in
the new building, fiber to the old building, wireless to the admin
building - and it worked!)

_Pete