[BARC-List] (no subject)

[Joel N. Weber II]

My question is ``what are you actually going to do with high speed ham
radio data links once you have them?''

For the most part, it seems like part 15 is more useful, because a
large fraction of the data I send over the internet wouldn't be legal
under the ham rules, for reasons such as encryption.  Part 97 is never
going to strike me as an interesting way to get Internet access from a
laptop.

It does seem like there's some potential for flexibility in FM voice
repeater linking that we don't have now, if a significant number of
repeaters started supporting linking over part 97 802.11.

There is some videoconferencing potential, but there's plenty of high
speed Internet around Boston, so I'm not really sure what that gets
you around here.

Maybe there are other applications I'm not thinking of, but I
personally have yet to see a reason why I want to run part 97 802.11
myself.

In some respects, Boston is going to be a *bad* place to experiment
with part 97 802.11, because there are lots of deployed part 15 802.11
networks all over the place, which is going to raise the noise floor
and reduce the effective range you're going to get if you try to build
a link with a high gain antenna at one end, and a completely
unmodified consumer 802.11 interface on the other end.

(And I still don't understand why anyone thinks there's any reliable
way to keep part 15 traffic out of part 97 networks that use the same
frequencies, given that part 15 users haven't been able to find any
really solid solutions except possibly IPsec, and or deciding that
they don't care if their network isn't perfectly secure.  I know of
one individual who insisted that his girlfriend wasn't going to use
his wireless access point until she could run IPsec on her laptop,
because he didn't feel any other approach to access control was
reasonable.)

There has been discussion that it would be nice to have transverters
to be able to use the 3.6 ghz ham band for 802.11, which mostly would
work around most of these problems, but I'm not sure if anyone has
started trying to build such things.