Tue, 31 Jan 2006

Planet.seattlewireless.net

Check out planet.seattlewireless.net. This is a aggregation of all SWN blogs, and a great way to see what everybody is up to.

For some reason, I am stuck with this stereotypical blogger/mac user icon for all my blog entries on this site. Perhaps someday i'll figure out how to set this @#$@# icon. Okay, looks like i figured this one out.

In unrelated news, I went down to Phoenix for the weekend. It was great to get away from the insane amount of rain pounding the northwest. The papers in Phoenix were reporting inverse records -- 110+ days of no rain. There was simply too much sun -- oh darn. Highs were in the mid 60's.

I rented a convertible and discovered it was just a little too cold to drive on the freeway with the top down this time of year. But I did it anyway -- why rent a convertible if you are going to drive with the top up all the time?

My daughter did not like the roofless vehicle, but just put up with it. I made a point not to show her that it had a retractable roof that folded up in the back.

Eventually, she figured out that it, indeed, had a roof--or in her words--a "house". After she saw that, I was nagged nonstop to tell the car to "make a house". Instead, we bought a large winter coat on clearance for $10 and bundled her up. She liked that.

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Fri, 27 Jan 2006

Tower Project Complete

As you may remember, SeattleWireless embarked on a tower node project in the start of december. I am happy to report that this project is now complete. The gear is on top of the UPN tower on Capitol Hill and is fully operational. The ESSID is "SWN-NodeAtoys", and is currently a 6dBi omni antenna. The UPN tower is the southwestern tower on top of madison.

NodeAtoys, on top of the UPN tower, runs DHCP, OLSR (a mesh routing protocol), and is available to anyone who wants to connect. I highly suggest a high gain directional antenna, as it will take a little bit more power than normal to light up this small omni. This was actually done on purpose to reduce the heavy amounts of interference in seattle area. 2.4GHz is a jungle, as you probably guessed.

Inital surveys using Kismet indicated that we are pulling in a couple of stray signals. One of the most interesting is a signal originating from an antenna located at a marina at the base of Magnolia. A non-directional antenna not really pointing at our tower that is several miles away (line of sight) is a very good sign that things are going to be great for people in the Seattle area who can see this tower.

I was not able to make it out today for the install, but check out Matt Westervelt's Blog for more details. Also, check out the NodeAtoys wiki page for official node-related information.

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Sun, 01 Jan 2006

MT/MO SMS Testing

I am playing with some MT/MO SMS. Feel free to send a test "text message" or email to 3603822103@nwrs.net. There is no SMSC setup, nor do i "own" this DID to the extent where someone can SMS directly to the phone number...but most carriers will support email anyways so it should work fine for most.

The text message limit seems to be around 373 characters, which is well above the typical SMS user data size of 160. Not certain if its a limitation of the phone, protocol, or sending software I am using. Still, quite nice!

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