High Speed RF

[Maitland Bottoms]

Hi,

I must respond to an earlier Terry Fox message, the "Where's my high
speed RF?" question.

The answer is: "Your soaking in it."

I happened to have my laptop in the car when I came to Tacos today,
and in my drive home I picked up 160 802.11b access points. (Hint: I
did not take the Beltway home, so I got to pick up signals from
neighborhoods and businesses along our local arteries.)

Alas, I was not also travelling with GPS, so the logs are a lot less
useful than they might be. But I have done similar trips with my
otherwise nearly useless DeLorme Tripmate GPS.

The density of signals is noticeably greater than it was when I was
out early in this past summer.

So while there is not really an amateur radio tie, 802.11 does foster
technical hobby activities. Check out the December meeting (held
January 7th) of NoVAWireless/CAWNet at http://www.novawireless.org/
where they will be talking about mobile wireless multicasting. Compare
and contrast that activity to tracking horses in the mountains using
packet radio.

-Maitland