I don't see anything particularly "revolutionary" about a mesh/node data network. That's been going on for years and years...
(Trying to keep this on-topic...) By the way, there's some math formulas done back in the 70s and 80s that show the maximum throughput rates of networks like this, and it'll suffer from things like the "hidden node" syndrome that Hams found with AX.25/Packet in the 80s and wireline engineers discovered during the design/engineering phases of Token Ring, Ethernet, etc. Random number generators tied to "back off" timers can only do so much... then the "cloud" falls apart. (The only difference between those protocols in some sense, and the protocols going over the air in the new systems, is that the "wire", or medium for transport, injects a HECK of a lot more noise, and must be better error-corrected, if you think about it using the OSI data networking model... "Layer 1" becomes the RF module of the design...) One stuck transmitter in a mesh like this (even with Spread Spectrum, there's only so many channels...)... will also take out/jam everything in its coverage area. (You didn't say if it's FHSS or some other sort of Spread Spectrum technology... I'd be curious as to what they're using if you know!) Like I said, plenty of RF jobs coming for people who can think like an RF geek, but apply principals of data networks to that thought too... :-) DF'ing might even become a re-gained art form, trying to find a "one in a million" transmitter that's gone spurious in that network! -- Nate Duehr, WY0X [email protected] On Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:12 -0500, "Joe" <[email protected]> wrote: I worked on an antenna problem recently on a 900Mhz spread spectrum meter system here in Connecticut. I only spent an afternoon, but the technology is fascinating. Two way communications from selected sites to the meters will eventually be implemented. If the customers meter does not have a direct path to the site it can relay it's data through another meter that it has connectivity to. Kind of like a big mesh network. Every meter is also a repeater.
