Wireless Access Point

[Stu Olson]

While some of you are probably a half dozen light years ahead of me in the computer field, I did finally make the plunge last week and picked up my first 802.11b wireless router for use at home.

Fry's Electronics had a NetGear Wireless Access Point on sale for $109 after rebate. It has a 4 port switch, NAT router, and WAP in it.

I opted for a USB interfaced transmitter for the notebook. While it is not as compact/handy as one that plugs into the PCMCIA slot, it will be mounted in the TJ along with the other radio equipment and I decided the ability to hang it off the end of a 4' USB cable would make positioning it much easier (for the most optimized signal). I've played with the PCMCIA transmitters at work and their little antennas are more directional than what I wanted to deal with at this point in time. If I changed my mind, another $75 will get me another transmitter.

Why the need for wireless when I have CAT5 cable running through the house? Well, I aquired a Panasonic Toughbook (awesome little sub 4lb. harsh environment notebook with high contrast LCD touch screen display) for use in my TJ. It has gone on a couple of trial runs while hooked to my Garmin III+ GPS and the results were nothing short of fantastic!

I am struggling with a suitable mount for the Toughbook. I guess it is time to visit Blaine. If he can scratch build a suspension system for his TJ, he should be able to figure out an awesome notebook mount during his 1st cup of morning coffee! (I'll see if he reads this forum or not!) ;(

[TObject]

Tell us more about the Toughbook. Which one did you get? How do you like the monitor working outside under the sun? Where did you get it? How much did you pay?

There was a guy on e-bay selling the Toughbook auto mounts police uses.

As far as wireless, I guess you?ll be driving around town now, connecting to all kinds of 802.11b networks...

[Dan-H]

now that you have taken the plunge, here is some light reading for you.

Might give you some more hobbies to explore

War Driving (w?r dri'vin) v.
1 Driving around looking for unsecured wireless networks.
-term coined by Pete Shipley

http://www.wardriving.com/

[TObject]

Ha! I've just read their HOWTO. I like the part where they tell that "Antennas are optional"

[Stu Olson]

TO,

The Toughbook CF-17 I got is no longer a current production model, but it was new out of the box. I traded some unused merchandise for it so the price is a moot point. However, I did find an on-line vendor (ie., computer consulting firm) that would sell me one for $1595 which included the OS and a USB floppy drive. (more about that in a bit)

oK....the reason I wanted the CF-17 is because of the ~8" diagonal display. All of its cousins are much bigger and would NOT fit as desired in the TJ. It is nothing to write home about....a 300 Mhz Celeron w/ 4/3 GB HD and 64MB memory. The guy I got it from tossed in an extra 128 MB of memory, a HP USB 4x CD-RW, and a Panasonic docking station and floppy drive. These latter two items are needed since the notebook has no internal floppy drive.

The display works well in the sunlight....I took it on two trips thus far, a day trip down south to meet some friends and a night run. Since i don't have a mount for it, I put it on the passenger seat and could easily read the MapSource software that my GPS was sending data to. It is significantly better in sunlight than my Toshiba TFT laptop. It is not perfect, but it does the job. I turned on the night vision color scheme during the night run (feature of my software) and it was GREAT.

The case is a magnesium allow....no cooling fan or vents....it appears the process is conduction cooled to the case. I read a gov't agency test review of it....they drove a car over it (with the lid closed) and no damage. The dumped 8 oz. of coffee into the keyboard, no damage. They put it in a humidity chamber at 95* for an hour, no damage.

The LCD display is a touch screen that works great. I am currently running Win98 on it and have the BIOS update and W2K drivers for everything if I decide to go that route, although I don't plan to right away given its primary use. This model listed for $3500 new (not that it is worht it...but that was the listing price).

I think that is about it. Oh yeah....it has a RAID controller in it too! D: