[HECnet] Intermittent Connection with PyDECnet?

[Paul Koning]

> On Mar 2, 2020, at 1:10 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
> 
> On 3/2/20 1:06 PM, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
>> Line of sight reminds me of another crazy idea I once heard about.
>> 
>> On one side of a valley in a highly wooded rural area, a technical
>> writer was highly desirous of broadband, yet none was to be had.  Whaay
>> away, on another side, broadband was available.  So what he did was find
>> somebody over there who could get broadband and offered to pay the
>> service.  Then he got a pair of access points (AP's) and set them up as
>> 'repeaters'.  This is the cool part: he connected the AP's to some
>> pretty awesome yagi's.
>> 
>> Bingo.  Broadband.  I thought this was a pretty fine hack, but I forget
>> where I read it.
> 
>  I did something very similar about ten years ago.  I was stuck in
> rural West Virginia for several months dealing with a family estate.  It
> was a huge house on a gigantic piece of land, and was awesome in just
> about every way, except unbelievably isolated.  No network access of any
> kind available there, except Hughes satellite, which is unusable for
> really much of anything.
> 
>  I put DDWRT on a WRT-54G, paired it with a small Yagi, and scanned
> around.  I ended up pointing it at the lights on a distant mountaintop
> on the other side of the valley, and, as you said, bingo.  We ran with
> that for about nine months.  I still have no idea of whose connectivity
> that was.
> 
>            -Dave

The complication: if you operate this as a ham radio link, you're fine with high power or gain antennas, but you have to make it ID, and you have to worry about the traffic carried.  On the other hand, if it's a Part 15 device (the usual mode) then the gain antenna might not be legal.  (I don't actually know the rules, but I would think that EIRP limits are part of it, and/or type acceptance certificate rules that say you can't modify the design.)

	paul