Dave's WiFi efforts

No news

2006-02-25T08:33:00.000+09:30

I've basically got WiFi on the backburner these days - lots of other things happening in my life.

I will get back to it - possibly - if/when I buy a house here and can make a more permanent setup.

Here's a decent page on building a parabolic dish: http://www.rootshell.be/~youtensi/

Dave

Slack

2005-09-22T11:09:00.000+09:30

Believe it or not - I am still not connected
Yes I am the world's biggest slacker
In my defence I was overseas from May to July

At the moment I am looking at strapping a 19dBi grid to one of my palm trees

Dave

Wet Season Hiatus / Email Address Change

2005-03-02T16:08:00.000+09:30

For those of you that are not aware; I live in the tropics of Australia. Darwin to be precise. It seems that the already slow and relaxed pace of Darwin comes to a virtual standstill during this time of year.

The same can be said for my current wifi-related activities.

All of the projects listed below are still happening, it's just that they're all on hold until it dries up a bit here.

By all means email me with any queries, my response time in that department has not suffered any seasonal slowdown!

Note that due to excessive spam to my old email address, it is now: 0305wifi at the domain name of this page.

Dave

Happy Hannukah

2004-12-31T02:05:00.000+09:30

I have got as far as sourcing connectors and collecting prices.

EXCEPT for Lucent MC type connectors.
(For micro-coax connections into PCMCIA cards)

Does anyone have any info on Australian sources for these?
Or any decent pages on modifying the cards to accept other RF connector types?

No progress on other stuff due to work, beer and girl commitments.

One good thing is that I ended up finding a mast...buried in my front yard.
This is really a MAST though...really, as in it came from a boat of some kind.

But I am not fussy, it's 6-7 metres long, aluminium, and will lash nicely to a pole at the front of my house.

May end up being a lot easier than a freestanding 12 metre monstrosity...IF it is high enough to suit my needs.

Anyway, forget about reading any amazing new stuff here in the next 2 weeks or so..will be working/beering/skirt-chasing for a while longer.

For those of you not in Darwin, it may interest you to know that the wet season has arrived....
In hopefully unrelated news, the relay we built recently has just stopped working (today). I am praying it's just a breaker issue related to the shockingly bad power we seem to have in Darwin....won't know until we go topside, hopefully tomorrow.

Fingers crossed the Linksys WRT54GS and the Minitar APs are not water-damaged or cooked in some way..

See you in 2005

Dave

Almost there

2004-12-14T21:43:00.000+09:30

Recent purchases:

2 * 802.11a and a/b ORiNOCO PCMCIA cards.
1 * New LCD screen for the wardiving laptop (Thanks Dad!)
2 * Cushcraft unity gain (2dBi) omnidirectionals

Soon to be purchased:

Assorted connectors and adaptors to allow me to connect any AP/card to any antenna under test.

Soon to be built:

Reference rig using 2 tripods and one of the above omnis.
This will be utilised for testing homebrew antennas for gain and radiation patterns.
It will have degree-adjustable azimuth, a scope and laser for alignment.

Mobile setup using second Cushcraft antenna. Used for mobile site-surveying of various relays around the traps.

If you are in Darwin or it's surrounds, drop me a line. There is a LOT of interest in WiFi connectivity here, you never know who may live close to you and be prepared to chip in towards setting up a relay.

As always, check DW for news, but if you don't get satisfaction there, contact me and I will see if I can help you out.

In other news....

No joy on a tower yet, I have one lined up but the owner has not gotten back to me yet. I don't want to push the issue; so it may be a while before I am properly on the air.

Have been playing with SNMP monitoring of our Linksys routers, also doing some PHP integration of retrieved SNMP stats into html pages.

Check out: this weird thing

They're trading on us!

Happy Holidays to you all..

Dave

Millner, Darwin, N.T, Australia

2004-11-10T01:26:00.000+09:30

Here's a link to the project I have been working on for the last 3 or so weeks:

Millner Pics.

Hopefully I have enough pics to do up a small piece on the construction of the relay.

Basically it comprises of 1 * Linksys routing AP and one Minitar AP in client mode for the backbone link.

The Linksys will eventually be used to route between segments (on different directional antennas, each with their own Minitar). It also drives the omni for loacl client connections.

Next is to get my place up as a client, or alternatively as an additional (routing) backbone node.

The plan is to have redundant routes in a roughly triangular cell topology.

Hopefully we will be implementing OSPF and maybe ETX or similar intelligent routing protocols.

Dave.

Still here, still active

2004-10-20T20:18:00.000+09:30

Hi fellow geeks.

I haven't disappeared off the face of the RF spectrum just yet...but have been skirting around the edges a bit.

Last month had the wok-style antennas in Silicon Chip magazine here in Oz, looked basically like a reprint of Stan-the-Man's NZ webpage (See link somewhere below, if you didn't already jump here from there)

Latest project is a repeater setup for Darwin Wireless. It's going to have 2 * Minitar APs, 1 * Linksys AP/router (running Linux). This setup will do away with the need for a dedicated router PC, as it all gets routed through the Linksys.

I am building a weatherproof enclosure (gets kinda wet up here) with a custom power-over-ethernet solution (PoE).

Basically it will go: 240VAC>>30VAC>>240VAC>>12VDC

Souund overly complicated and inefficient?

It probably is, but it will also be super-reliable and easily repaired with off-the shelf parts.

I thought about passive PoE, but it sounds too dodgy for my liking, especially when you consider stuff like line regulation under differing load conditions.

The general consensus amongst DW members is that PoE should be avoided, but I personally think that this is just a product of past experience with badly conceived homebrew setups, or one of the many cheap off-the-shelf solutions.

Hopefully I will be all finished and actually wirelessly connected with the next 2 weeks.

(The repeater is to be sited on the top floor of a 5-storey apartment building near to me)

I am documenting the build as I go...so I will post a summary here when it is finished.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to drop me a mail.

Dave

BIG Muthaf*cking dish!

2004-08-30T22:12:00.000+09:30

Ok, time to get serious....

Here's the latest addition to the family:

As you can see, it's bigger than a tall person.

<

Here's Big Ben compared to the old model. Anyone know the formula for gain as a function of dish diameter?

<

Trying to move it for tuning purposes was a bit of a mission:

No signal detected in Netstumbler :( We were trying for an AP < 3 kms away, but through heavy (tropical) vegetation.

We shall continue in our efforts, some focusing, better mounting, testing against a near source, etc etc.

D

Spirit Sucks

2004-08-30T22:05:00.000+09:30

Ok, I have given up on the Spirit USB devices, as far as I am concerned they officially suck. It looks like _another_ one has bitten the dust, and a third one is also suspect. (It's detected but will not start)

This could all be a case of bad luck, combined with Windows XP running on a s l o w Pentium I laptop...but to be honest I can't be bothered finding out.

Personally, I think it was either hot-plugging or overheating that killed them.

I am still keen on the NZ version, which has a ZyDAS chipset, seems superior to the Atmel, or at least the spirit implementation of the Atmel chip.
The only complaint I have about the NZ device is that it has some weird kind of ceramic antenna, which apparently spews RF in all directions....At least the Spirit was a proper matched dipole with a reflector...and it also had a funky coax PCB pad that could have been used for patching to an external 1/4 wave stub or similar.

But you get that on the big jobs...time to move on.

Stuff in the works

2004-08-14T16:05:00.000+09:30

-Waiting on Hills (25dBi?) antenna, will be testing USB device as a replacement feedhorn

-DSE NZ dongle is in the mail, should have it in the next day or so...will be doing comparison testing with AUS version of the device

-USB-over-CAT5/CAT6. Have obtained some scraps (10-20 metres) of a few different cable types. Nic is looking into some RS485 line-amp designs, we may end up designing a generic device that will allow us to plug USB "B" type connectors to one side, and then have an RJ45 connector as output...then maybe just terminate the other end of the CAT5 with an "A" type socket (for dongle connection)

For starters though we will just straight patch an "A-to-A" cable with some CAT5/6

Results will be posted when available

(Anyone have any good USB error-testing software? Need to be able to detect retries, dropped packets, throughput etc)

Darwin WiFi

2004-07-30T17:08:00.000+09:30

Ok, I made it to Darwin...

My mate Justin has bought another Spirit USB device from Dick Sniff, and I'm about to head to Asian Emporium to buy some skimmers to use as dishes. Tomorrow we hope to do some distance testing from Sprit to Spirit.

Courtesy of my new work I now have a couple of pipe fittings which we will be using to centre the dongles in the skimmers....

I have also made a few contacts who may be able to get us some satellite/microwave dishes...so we are going to try for a high-gain setup, using the Spirit to replace the dish's feedhorn.

More news as it happens.

Spirit USB Take 2

2004-07-25T14:40:00.001+09:30

Exchanged the adaptor at DSE no problems, tried the new unit on Win98SE. Still didn't get reliable behaviour, so I ended up reloading my laptop with Win2K Professional.

I've been testing against Netstumbler 0.4 and it works fine (With limitations). It's probably a limitation of the Atmel chipset in the device, or Netstumbler doesn't fully support it.

You don't get true Signal/Noise readings, all you have is an RSSI (Relative signal strength indicator) display. This is in arbitrary units, so it means nothing in real-world terms like µV, dBm, dBW etc.

Also the displayed signal seems to either be almost full strength or none at all...I don't know if that is characteristic of this unit, or just a generally occuring thing with DSS, maybe it's kinda like an FM "capture effect"

If anyone understands the bit I just wrote, mail me and let me know what you think. I am reasonably sure that normal signals displayed on Netstumbler show a much greater dynamic range than I have seen so far.

It should be pointed out that all of the above testing has been done with the SPIRIT device alone, no dish or reflector has been used with any success yet.

The setup was as follows:

Pentium I 233Mhz, 128M RAM
1 * 3 metre USB 2 cable (Damn ripoff, USB vers 1 would be fine)
1 * Spirit Wireless USB LAN Adapter (DSE catalog number XH4268)

The USB cable was just slung over the rear-vision mirror in my car, and slightly adjusted to sit horizontally.

I'm a bit confused as to the orientation of the PCB antenna, as it seem to be horizontal to me. You'd think that orienting it vertically (by turning it on it's side) would produce a better signal, but this was not found to be the case.

However this was inside the car, and the Faraday cage effect along with a few reflections were probably present.

Driving around suburban Melbourne produced LOTS of logs..if anyone wants to see them then email me at: wifi _at_ davesplanet _dot_ org

So in a nutshell:

a)It works with Window$ 2000
b)The signal strength information sucks

I think I was dreaming a bit when I selected the original dish...it will work, but due to the tight shape of the parabola the beamwidth may be too narrow to be any use.

I just arrived in Darwin so give me a week to settle a bit, then I'll post some more results.

Any questions?

Mail me.

Dave

Pop goes the dongle

2004-07-10T03:14:00.000+09:30

Ok well I'm off to a great start.

I've managed to kill the Spirit USB device, Windows 98 no longer detects it.
I also slightly mangled the dish while foolishly trying to turn it inside out!
(Searching for that perfectly parabolic shape)

I'm happy to say that at this point the hose-fitting is in perfect health.

Have a look at the pictures below and see if you can work out what I did wrong.
Tomorrow I'm off to Dick Smith for a replacement part.

Who said beer and 802.11 don't mix?

WiFi stuff lives here

2004-07-10T01:28:00.000+09:30

This is for the nerds. All you normal-type readers have been warned.

Today I went shopping.
Specifically I bought the following items:

1 * steel mesh food cover (I don't know what else to call it..see pictures)
1 * Spirit Wireless USB LAN Adapter (DSE catalog number XH4268)

I also scrounged a 'Gardenia' type hose fitting from my Mum's backyard.

It should be pointed out that this entire project is only happening as a direct result of me reading Stan's webpage.

Thanks for the inspiration Stan.

$8.95 + $49.98 + $0.00 = $58.93AUD (Cost so far)

Respect to all the freaks at darwin wireless