On Sat, 2010-01-23 at 09:15 +0800, james wrote: > . . . and with a masthead antenna had coverage in the Abrolhaus islands 60Km > out to > sea from Geraldton.
As far as I was aware the standard setup at the Abrolhos fishermen's shacks is a moderate gain Yagi (e.g. 9 dBi?) hooked to an Ericsson W25. Provides 2 analog phone lines (buiness phone and fax) and the broadband is used for school-of-the-air for the families. I guess they run them from solar panels. We use a similar setup at several sites inland - actually have one as a Telstra landline (landline number, landline fees). Telstra will do it if you squeeze their right bits - it only took about 9 months on the case. To get back to the original point of this thread - these network-connected boxes just work, with anything, with multiple PCs hooked up (they usually have a hub and wifi). They use a normal SIM card, just like a phone or USB device. They have a connection for an external antenna (though I couldn't find a cable connector that fitted a Huwei). They run off 12 V and can have internal rechargeable batteries (W25 anyway). Sure there are situations where a dongle is more convenient but you have to know it's going to work, which is never a problem with the network devices. Kevin. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
