Wireless data links for telemetry, south-eastern US?

pager

point

feeling

Phone lines would require to enter premises. And sometimes there is none. Cell towers, that's why I started the thread, to see who is the prevalent carrier down there. This is where Aquis looks rather promising in their SE coverage.

Usually not via cell or similar networks. Long distance typically makes no difference, it's the air time and even more so the monthly fees that count. And also modem costs if it's not CDMA or GSM.

ounts of

vice

ional

h of this

aribbean

nits will

etworks

if it's

erage?

areas

ally

eir

ot of

overage

ern

l is on

ach

ks if

rks

on

ne

find

S),

e it

have

. No

tc..

on

ets

n,

ed

t then.

DGE

able

re.

an

se

PLONK!

unts of

ice

onal

of this

ribbean

its will

tworks

f it's

rage?

reas

lly

ir

t of

verage

rn

is on

ch

s if

ks

ind

),

it

ave

No

c..

ts

then.

GE

ble

e.

Yes, one of a few free programs to sniff out cellular stuff. If you read their forum, it is mostly comprised of cellular technicians and people who own/work in cellular stores. [OK, only the geeky cellular store employees.] I noticed the Howard forum has a cell site logging page going, though only for the bay area.

er

As an aside, the infamous industrial vacuum cleaner is a classic glitch source on the power line. Having dealt with these gaming companies, they routinely put glitches on their power inputs for test purposes to insure noise spikes don't cause payouts. Things can get out of sync between the display and the payout computer, and it gets ugly. There is the occasional glitch that causes a slot machine to physically display something that should pay out, but the computer disagrees, and legally, the computer wins. Another EMI source is the piezo ignitor.

If there ever was a book to be written about glitching the mains, it would be from these gaming/vending manufacturers, especially Mars Electronics. Really sharp people there. Anyway, be sure to go nutso over protecting your box in the field. Anything can happen to something that is left unattended. Maybe a cyclic code in the data, authenticity coding, stuff like that. Authencity coding is pretty important if you use a pager scheme since there are (cough cough) test programs to generate paging data, and of course surveillance software as well.

Tell the laser driver mfgs. A client had an expensive one running, janitor comes in, plugs in one of them big silver Hoovers ... phut ...

I would not want to be the one having to explain that to a group of semi-drunk gamblers with tattoos all over ;-)

What do they ignite in there?

Yep, been through the paces there. A lot. It gets really interesting when stuff is directly exposed to thunderstorms like in this case.

ile

ager

e.

ll)

le

!"

Having dealt with these gaming

They use the piezo to ignite the gas (butance). When California started the no smoking law in bars, I designed a box to detect the piezo ignitor going off, mostly as a "can it be done" exercise, and perhaps as something to patent. You can detect the lighter quite easily. Just a bit of wire and a high impedance amp will sniff the ignitor going off, so it was an hour of goofing off in the lab to put it together. However, there are piezo ingitors in kitchen stoves, which could be going off, and some really cheap lighters still use flint.

I kid you not, I discovered a latch-up prone part when I switched off a heat shrink gun and the spike when though the bench supply to the DUT. This part already passed normal latch-up bench testing.

As yet another aside, I put all my expensive electronics on a double conversion UPS. I'm convinced the only way to trap power line surges is to rectify the AC, filter and diode surge protect that DC,then use a true sine inverter. Noisy and expensive, but worth it. There are non- UPS versions of such gear sold to the high end video/audio market.

Then they would have found out that by buying a cheap BIC lighter they could get away with smoking :-)

Actually the ones we use to light the kindling in the barbie are all flint. Only the fancy long lighter for the wood stove is piezo. A friend of ours has the best one: In the shape of a Winchester rifle.

Whoops ...

I must be lucky. Occasionally when I make a big mess while building prototypes I haul the big shop vac in here and just fire it up. Nothing has every reacted. Of course I am pretty diligent with line filters and stuff.

On a sunny day (Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:16:06 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :

Switching the old Weller soldering iron on / off repeatedly was able to crash a PC. Transformer...

a PC.

Get a better PC :-)

I have Wellers running here and I turn them off every time I leave for a coffee on the deck etc. Never crashed anyhting.

An old fashioned electric drill is a pretty handy source of trash.

What do you do when the operator shuts down the outdated pager service?

Phut! *KABLAM* ;-)

Isn't there a low frequency service that will meet his needs... create your own radio link?

Hell! At his data rate... smoke signals ?:-)

...Jim Thompson

Make sure you plonk all of his attempts at a personality:

Dimbulb Scorecard:

Abbey Somebody AnimalMagic Archimedes' Lever AwlSome Auger Bart!

BigBalls Bungalow Bill Capt. Cave Man ChairmanOfTheBored Chieftain of the Carpet Crawlers

DarkMatter Corbomite Carrie DarkSucker Do I really need to say? Dorothy with the Red Shoes on

Dr. Heywood R. Floyd FatBytestard FunkyPunk FieldEffectTrollsistor FunkyPunk FieldEffectTrollsistor GoldIntermetallicEmbrittlement

Hattori Hanzo Herbert John \\Jackie\\" Gleason" HiggsField IAmTheSlime ItsASecretDummy

Kai LargeMarge life imitates life MadManMoon MakeNoAttemptToAdjustYourSet

snipped-for-privacy@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org

Mr.Eko Mr. Haney Mycelium Neanderthal

Phat Bytestard RoyLFuchs scorpius

SkyPilot SomeKindOfWonderful

Son of a Sea Cook SoothSayer Spurious Response StickThatInYourPipeAndSmokeIt Sum Ting Wong

Sum Ting Wong

SuspendedInGaffa The Great Attractor

TheGlimmerMan TheJoker

TheKraken The Last Mimsy TheQuickBrownFox snipped-for-privacy@thebarattheendoftheuniverse.org

UltimatePatriot

UpGrade ValleyGirl VioletaPachydermata WallyWallWhackr

along with others that were trapped by generic filters.

Well, that is why I started the thread. See if anyone knows about such services that aren't likely to go away. I suppose I am not the only one. There has got to be some stuff out in the boonies that's hooked up to an alarm company. 20 miles beyond where the singing wires end or something.

Yeah, replace the fuse with a fuze :-)

Remember, li'l box needs to transmit, no big antennae.

Would work. But frowned upon by some fire departments during summer.

| [snip] |

Nymbecile is far easier to filter than you might imagine. Contact me privately for how to do it in Agent Reader. ...Jim Thompson

Look, there are older services in use out in the boonies, its just finding them. I know there are allocations from my ham radio days.

There are 30, 49, 72,75 and 900 mhz distributed systems for this sort of thing.

many government folks use meteor scatter, no kidding.

Are your units within a RF hop of each other or randomly distributed?

If within a hop, you can use packet protocols, ie forward and store,

There were/are 138/142 Mhz low data rate satellite services , 220 mhz land mobile radio data services, and vehicle/cargo tracking.

Near Vertical Incident Skywave comes to mind as well and there are HF utility band assignments for this sort of thing. Heck, NVIS messaging would be a startup I would invest in.

Pipeline and Power companies need these services, and there are pipeline and power companies everywhere in the US Get a ride on some one else's low band or 900 mhz scada systems....

Your looking in the wrong place with cellular.... There are FCC allocations for this sort of telemetry. I would think inmarsat or a KU band uplink is too expensive for you, but there are other services for trucking, etc.

Try Orbcomm for example. There must be other little LEOs.

These things were around 700$ a few years ago:

And I would not doubt one bit that iridium offers a similar service.

Take a look at the FCC regs, pick a candidate service and then go to the FCC GIS and search for licensee within radius of a coordinate.

please note my address on this post is a spam trap.

Steve

He might as well use carrier pigeons. Nothing beats the weight to bandwidth ratio of a load of USB sticks on a carrier pigeon! ;-)

Giganews has very limited header information, unlike some other NNTP servers. :(

s.com/globalcom.htm

I think satellite is a less stable platform than pager. The birds have a limited life and get replaced often.

There are hospitals that depend on the one-way pagers since they rather limit the transmitters on site for obvious reasons. Some places take away your cellphone and give you a pager.

I think some form of paging will be around for a long time. The problem is you don't know who the last man standing, OK, make that company standing, will be.So you may have be to flexible in the pager interface. Without going into details, it is pretty easy to figure out which pager service has the most data customers. There are all sorts of devices sending out their status over pagers.