On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Mustafa Siddiqui wrote: > Scott: > > I live east of Hwy 10, one block east of Egret (corner of University Ave. > and Northdale). I am willing to experiment and mount such an antenna on > my roof. I am not a techie person to construct the antenna but could > financially contribute towards purchase of one. I am also willing to put > in the required time and effort if you are game! > This is actually great, I'm thinking of making up a biquad antenna first (some of the primestar dish users use them to feed their dishes) and see how it works standalone. The real hard part is making sure that even if I can get roof ok-ed with either a primestar (theres *tons* of DBS antennas on the roofs, I don't see why another one is going to be out of the question. ) or a biquad (its small, I might be able to hide it or convince the townhome board that its not a scary device. its not like I'm going to be putting up a huge HF antenna, and I've been amazingly keeping my 2m antenna indoors because it gets enough range right now for my uses :P). It would be cool if someday there is an overlay net going after enough people start experimenting to have an omni up at some of these 'high-density' housing areas to allow others nearby to attach to the network in that area. The hard part is convincing non-techies that this could be really cool. Perhaps it would be neat if we could setup some infrastructure and configured software so someone could easily put a machine at home on the network and setup some sort of vpn software so they could tunnel from a laptop or otherwise back out through their internet connection or get to their machines. Or heck, even a cheap linux box with a client card that can have an external antenna. Downside, really, is linux box is 'hard' to non-techies if its not 'dead simple' to configure. I do think, however, that users would start showing up in some way if they are able to reach their machines at home via a user supported network of some sort from specific places. Getting there is hard. :| -- Scott Dier <dieman at ringworld.org> http://www.ringworld.org/ _______________________________________________ Twin Cities Wireless Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.tcwug.org tcwug-list at tcwug.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tcwug-list