[ACARS] REQ: Mobile logging?

Wed, 21 Aug 2002 15:54:31 +0000

Andreas

I have been taking an old laptop with me when going abroad for many years 
and leaving it in hotel rooms. An old 386 laptop is quite dispensible! Put 
DOS, AirMaster V3, and PKZIP on it and away you go. Zip the files to floppy 
on a daily basis and if the PC goes, hard luck. That said I have never had 
any problems

For years I had an old Compaq 486 (I still do, but most of the screen is u/s 
and it is a bit of a challenge!): I now use a Toshiba brick with Windows 98 
and AirNav and that seems to be fine

One tip: there is often a lot of RF interference in hotel rooms: if you can, 
take a small dipole and a long length of cable and dangle the antenna out of 
the hotel window / off the balcony as far away from the PC and especially 
any laptop power device (often a source of high RF interference). Again I've 
had no problems in hotels in various European and US countries - except when 
some drunken party on the balcony below in Dallas decided to unscrew half 
the dipole!

One other point to watch: some hotels power everything in the room off the 
same switch that the room key slots in to. You may need to hunt a power 
supply that isn't connected that way; or you could improvise some stiff card 
to slot in the room key holder - at least until the maid services the room! 
So set the PC up to go in to stand-by mode when the battery runs down

Take the socket adaptor; and take / buy a multi-way lead / adaptor so you 
can power the laptop; the scanner; and whatever the hotel had in the socket 
to start with: the best $7 purchase I ever made in the US

Ed

>From: "Andreas Schmidt" <[email protected]>
>Reply-To: [email protected]
>To: [email protected]
>Subject: [ACARS] REQ: Mobile logging?
>Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 18:34:03 +0200
>
>Hello,
>
>just a short answer: I would like to take some sort of mobile
>equipment for logging with me, when going on holidays. Especially
>when going by a/c a laptop is a bit to big (and maybe not the best
>idea leaving the laptop running in the hotel room...). Is there a
>solution with a PDA or something like that? I still have an old HP-
>PDA with a 4,77MHz 8086 CPU and pure DOS inside. Some
>software running on that, using a hardware modulator of course?
>TIA!
>
>Best regards, Andreas
>
>
>Andreas Schmidt
>Web:    http://www.dus-spot.de
>         http://www.zauberwald-fans.de
>E-MAIL: [email protected]
>S-Mail: Am Wehrgraben 8
>         D - 58339 Breckerfeld
>
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