[Cu-wireless] Equipment needs?

[Ralph E. Johnson]

I'm writing a budget, and might be able to get some equipment for 
community wireless.  I recall someone mentioning some kind of monitor or 
measuring device that would be useful for setting up antennas.  It cost 
several thousand dollars.  What was this thing, and how useful would it 
be?  What kind of reusable equipment should we have?  I might be able to 
spend $2000 on it.

I was looking on e-bay recently and found a guy in Indiana who has 
several hundred 66MZ 486 boxes with 16 meg of memory that he can't get 
rid of.  More precisely, people will not pay $1 + $25 shipping.  Someone 
offered $25 for forty of them.  Would these boxes have enough horsepower 
to make good routers?  It might be nice to standardize on some 
equipment.  I'm not saying we should do it now, but this indicates to me 
that we could probably pick up a few hundred similar boxes for $10-$20 
apiece when we were ready for them.  Somebody was offering 166MZ 
Pentiums with 16 meg and dual ethernet connections for $20 apiece, but 
he was in California and the shipping would be murder.

-Ralph Johnson