Darwin WiFi

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

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

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

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