[svlug] Ricochet (was Re: Packets over ham radio.)

[Chris Waters]

On Wed, Jul 26, 2000 at 06:15:10PM -0700, dfox at belvdere.vip.best.com wrote:

> Interestingly enough, I talked to a ricochet employee on the bus 
> yesterday, and he was talking about what they're planning on doing -
> he had his laptop with him, and he was on the net right there on the
> bus :). Currently they do 56K wireless, but he was talking about
> a 128K rollout, and 300K in the near future (the latter is at the
> low end of DSL/broadband).

I got a ricochet with my laptop from work, and it's pretty nice.  One
disadvantage: it doesn't work well when you're moving too fast
(e.g. on Caltrain, it has problems except when the train comes to a
stop).  I suspect that this has to do with the overhead of switching
from one repeater to the next as you move.  And it doesn't seem to
work in BART tunnels -- this may be a point of only minor interest to
south-bayers.  And, unlike, say, cellular, it only works in certain
metropolitan areas.  Fine for the whole bay area, but if you want to
visit your family in Kansas, you might need a different solution.

Works quite well with Linux/BSD with the following caveats: when you
login, it doesn't prompt at all, which seems to confuse some automatic
ppp script generators.  Not an issue if you know what you're doing,
but novices may find it a bit tricky.  There was also some obscure
parameter I had to set to keep it from generating frequent, regular
errors that bloated my log files.  It was simple, to fix, but very
hard to track down.

But they are very nice little devices, and I'm quickly becoming
addicted.  Can't wait for the next jump in speed.

(Not forwarded to the fellow from S. Africa, because I don't think
it's an option for him.)
-- 
Chris Waters   xtifr at dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
      or    xtifr at debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
                             | this .signature file.