Comments | laughingvulcan: Harper 1.5ish...

laughingvulcan

Harper 1.5ish...

Mar 13, 2006 22:23

After a farily interesting day at work I let Nikki know that I was stopping off at Radio Shack. About thirty five minutes and thirty five dollars later, I got home with a) New 15/30 watt soldering iron, b) Wire, c) Legs (for a separate project,) and d) cheap-but-servicable multimeter ( Read more... )

Comments 6

jon3831 March 14 2006, 04:44:54 UTC

Hey, but now you get to cannibalize it for parts!

laughingvulcan March 14 2006, 05:30:23 UTC

Which is an idea I absolutely adore... but Nikki still sees the old hard drive from this laptop, which I know is deader than heck... but I can't get rid of. Never know when you might need to show someone what a laptop hard drive looks like, in its' innards. :D

If I had any brains, I'd scuttle the idea to go for an accounting/business masters and go back to electrical engineering or something much more Harperish. :D

laughingvulcan March 14 2006, 05:50:27 UTC

Oh, and as I look across the living room at my CPU unit, leaning up against it is the old WiFi router, which was clearly the source of 97.6% of our apartment's connection problems - we almost never have trouble now unless the cable is actually out.

But you never know when I'll need the parts to downcovert it into a 2m rig. :)

jon3831 March 14 2006, 06:11:56 UTC

Reminds me of an aborted project I once undertook... As an exercise in insanity, we were designing a long-range WiFi link using off the shelf components...

Some research yielded that certain channels (1-6, IIRC) as defined by the 802.11b/g spec are within the 2.4GHz amateur band...

So, instead of being limited to the +24dBm mandated by the standard (and Part 15), you operate it under Part 97, set your SSID as your callsign, and don't encrypt, and you're legal.

Part of this prompted purchase of a 30 watt 2.4GHz linear (now being used for ATV), and the discovery that the Linksys WRT54G router ran a version of Linux as firmware that the enterprising hobbyist could reflash and modify...

Never got much past the theory stage, but it's a fun thought exercise nonetheless.

It's also how I wound up with my frankenrouters. WRT54Gs running various third-party firmwares hooked up to barbeque-grate wireless cable TV dishes...

Thread 6