Lyle_Seaman@transarc.com wrote:
A couple of my neighbors and I were talking about setting up a short-distance radio LAN (we talked about just running coax, but one of them is across a street and about 60 yds down, we don't want to buy/lease rights-of-way, etc). While I know my way around a soldering iron, I haven't designed a circuit in 10 years, and even then they weren't terribly complicated. Pointers to commercially available hardware or kit plans would be appreciated.
Well, I did something similiar about 3 years ago with a friend. But we just laid a wire down on the street one evening, spread roofing tar over it (the liquid sealant type) and let it dry overnight. :) If your street has had many patches/repairs over the years, it's unlikely a casual observer would notice. (Those that did notice ours thought it was pretty creative...) But anyway, on the radio circuit: Building a radio transceiver isn't too difficult...but connecting it to your computer could be. Probably the easiest thing to do is get a simple analog transciever, and use a error-correcting modem. Unfortunately that wouldn't be much better than doing it over the phone anyway... But let me know how you're project works out, I might be interested in doing something similiar.