[BARC-List] (no subject)

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 12:10:25 -0500

Couple of comments:

I think the fact that we are experimenting with 802.11 under part97 is a
goal upon itself. Seeing that something "works" in a non-trivial way is
part of HAM radio. Compare it to HF DX... When you're talking to that
far-away station, you are not exchanging any useful information beyond
what is needed to ID yourself and show that the connection "works"
("KC4AAA this is KX1T - You are 59. 73"). However, I think you had some
good ideas about potential candidates.... I don't think that "running a
HAM-only public access point to the internet" is necessarily the goal of
these experiments.

As for keeping Internet traffic out, I think that is only relevant if
you'd use your HS connection for pay or on behalf of your employer.
Browsing the web would generally be OK, as is checking email. Browsing
to "questionable" pages could violate the "indecent transmissions" rule,
so you should refrain from that.

Encryption is not needed. First of all, if you use a small-angle
antenna, your signal shouldn't be too obvious for "general" public
access cards that are not in the path. And there are other ways: you can
restrict at your Access Point which MAC addresses can be used to link to
the AP, restrict the number of DHCP sessions your AP can hand out
simultaneously, etc. I don't think that we need to protect use by HAMs
under "all circumstances", we just want to protect it under "most
circumstances". I think we can provide sufficient protection not using
WEP or any other encryption.

As for interference, if you do a little "wardriving" aournd Boston,
you'd find that most AP's are at the "LinkSys default" channel 6. You
would get minimal interference by using Channel 2, which is within the
HAM 2.4 GHz band, and outside the  "protected" frequency zone which
AMSAT requested to keep free because of interference with our HAM
satellites.

I think, that before we start experimenting with 802.11 networks on 3.6
GHz, we should first get some experience on 2.4 GHz. This can then be
expanded to include transverters to be active on 3.6. To use an analogy,
NASA didn't start their space program by sending a man to the moon, they
started out with smaller things.

Just my opinions...

73s,

 -Ram=F3n

Ram=F3n F. Kolb, KX1T, PA3EUG, Boston, MA, USA [FN42KI]
ICQ:77117744; MSNMGR:[email protected]
http://kx1t.webhop.org

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joel N. Weber II
Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2003 14:00
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [BARC-List] (no subject)

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.

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