[Cu-wireless] ARRL interested in 802.11b for long range wireless network

[David Young]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 03:03:10PM +0800, Illustrious niteshad wrote:
> 
> Last Friday, I attended a meeting of the Motor City Radio Club (www.w8mrm.org) where I learned about the National Traffic System, which is a network of amateur radio networks, much like the Internet is a network of computer networks.  The only difference is that NTS has been operating since the 1920s, and thus is voice and CW driven rather than digital data.  In 2003, the Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL, www.arrl.org) announced an interest in adding long range digital data networks to NTS using 802.11b as the underlying network protocol.  Remember that holders of amateur (aka "Ham") radio licenses operate under part 97 of the FCC rules, rather than part 15, thus they are able to broadcast at much higher power levels than the unlicensed part 15 equipment that we're using.
>  
> The speaker at the MCRC meeting expressed an interest in attracting
> younger people (average age of hams is currently 56 years old) to the
> hobby and noted that digital data networks are the interesting problem
> to work on right now.  It sounds like not all amateur groups are as
> anti-802.11 as the Urbana group.

I don't think that the Urbana group is anti-802.11. They are protective
of their bands, however.

BTW, there are really a lot of interesting things you can do with digital
data networks without being a ham licensee.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933