"Black Mountain Link 1" "Allison North SJ Link 2"

With my new wifi card in hand I decided to take my laptop and gps for a little drive around Fremont. I was hoping to find a few free or at least public for-pay hotspots. I figured I'd see a mostly home AP's and hopefully a few with names that I'd either recognize or would stand out (like "tmobile" or "boingo"). Well, the access point noise in Fremont is immense. I logged 850 separate ssids after driving a

2km on a side squarish loop. The only public hotspots I found were the fremont library (catch-and-release NAT hack) and Mission Valley Roasting (didn't stop to try it).

Two ssids did stand out and I'm curious what they could be. Both ssids include the names of mountains that have large antenna farms on top of them. Both are 802.11g with a 11Mbits/sec data rate. Any one know what these are? Some local experimenter's group? A commercial venture? Google has a hit or two for each of these, but the hits are just other folks wondering what these are too.

"Black Mountain Link 1" "Allison North SJ Link 2"

-wolfgang

Reply to
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht
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Just a guess, but since these are well known transmitter sites, perhaps they use wifi as part of echolink (or similar) interface. It would take a bit of googling, but you could see if any of the ham gear at these sites have such features.

Black Mountain is quite a haul from Fremont. Allison is not so far. I see from your website you have hiked the East Bay hills. You can visit Allision doing that hike from Ed Levin to Mission Peak. [It helps to have a partner so you can make this a one way trip. From a timing viewpoint, you want to start in Fremont and end in Milpitas since they lock up the parking area at Ed Levin.]]

Reply to
miso

Thanks. Knowing one keyword like "echolink" is vital to get the mystery to unravel.

Yup. It is a clean shot from my roof though. There are lots of places one can get a good view of it.

Yup, we've done the Levin hike. I even got to carry the dgps radio, lead-acid battery and gps. This was back in the days of SA, so a tracklog would wander +/- 50meters without differential.

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Maybe its time to load up the backpack with a laptop and various antennas and see what I can see from the top of Mission Peak or Mt. Allison.

-wolfgang

Reply to
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht

FYI, there are competing versions of Echolink, such as IRLP, eQSO, and Wires-II. I've only stumbled upon Echolink and IRLP in my travels. In theory, you can talk PC to PC using these schemes (at least Echolink), but that seems kind of dumb. I do like the idea hooking up repeaters across the internet, which doesn't require line of site like NFM links. Of course, in an emergency, these links will probably fail.

I did a google of Echolink and wifi, and got way too many false hits to see if anyone is using wifi to do such interconnects, but it certainly is feasible.

Regarding DGPS, ya know, it's ok to be just a little off when you record those trails. ;-)

I have this matra that I only want to carry one thing, so I have a cellphone-type PDA, but it is the older type that doesn't also have wifi. However, a PDA with wifi would be handy for sniffing all sorts of wifi in remote areas. I never cease to be amazed at where wifi pops up, such as railroad facilities, utility companies (power lines), etc. Nellis Air Force Base has a rather powerful wifi network used fby aircraft mechanics. The Las Vegas Metro PD has a wifi network.

So much RF to sniff, but you just can't lug a notebook everywhere.

Regarding what you can "see", I've been fiddling with two programs: SPLAT! and GRASS. Both can be used to find line of site from locations. SPLAT! is trivial to use, but not very accurate. All I did was fix a compilation flag to get SPLAT to work. GRASS is another story.

Reply to
miso

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