Technomadic Goodies and High-tech Wire

First, a correction: in my last update, I indulged in a rantlet (since deleted) that complained about a lack of response from RadioLabs over a month of attempting to ask some tech questions before ordering. It turned out that a link to this blog in my email sig file was getting snagged by their spam filter, and they never knew I was attempting to get in touch. This is a good reminder that email is considerably more open-loop than it used to be (for entirely technical reasons), and that jumping to conclusions about a lack of response to messages is not always justified. Correspondence since has suggested that they are very cool folks, every bit as responsive as their website suggests.

Speaking of great companies, I want to thank Technologic Systems, Wireless Cables, Buddipole, and PAR Electronics for their excellent support of this project. A full list of all system components will be on the new Shacktopus web page... Real Soon Now.

I know I've been a bit of a tease in these postings about what, exactly, this thing is. Mostly it's because I haven't had time to write about it properly... which is another one of those things that needs to happen between now and Sea-Pac in mid-June. Basically, I've decided to build my essential technomadic toolset into a convenient pack so the hard-core geeky bits are always available and not tightly integrated with a micro-trimaran. The result is a polycarbonate box designed to mate with a laptop pack, forming a "Shack To Go" that integrates lots of interesting gear into a single user interface: a Yaesu FT-817 with Elecraft T1 tuner, dedicated micro dual-bander for the DTMF remote control link, embedded ARM Linux system, TNC, GPS, speech synthesizer, Bluetooth link to my PDA, Wi-Fi board with local whip, console LCD/keypad, computer controlled audio mixing matrix and flash audio recorder, amp and preamp for local mic/phones/speakers, Li-Ion smart battery system, cell-phone interface, and suite of sensors. The case that holds this also has room for a thin laptop and various accessories, and a companion pack carries the complete Buddipole antenna package, dual-band yagi for the LEO birds, Wi-Fi yagi for those distant hotspots, and a solar panel.

I have a pathological inability to keep things simple, but this thing really is going to be fun... providing a robust set of technomadic tools that will work on ANY substrate: Microships, OPBs (Other Peoples' Boats), Amtrak, or my own two feet.

Also, I'm trying something new this time around: productizing. In the past, my survival hinged on the almost accidental spin-offs of speaking and writing gigs, keeping me afloat while I devoted my energy to building and traveling aboard gizmologically intensive machines. It took many years to build up a self-sustaining level of buzz, then I coasted on that through the mid-'90s... enough to get Microship fabrication well underway. Then a lot of time passed, the economy changed, and the project evolved a few times.

So now, instead of waiting for a yet-undefined Microship expedition to ramp up PR to the point where I can make a living at it, I'm positioning this new project as a prototype and demo platform for a product line. My own Shacktopus is a low-power backpack system, but we are also making sure that every step in the hardware and software development process accommodates future marine and automotive versions. The initial spin-offs include the enclosure mated to a high-quality commercial pack, the software package, the power-management system, the "RigNexus" board that handles all the audio routing, and any random bits of custom electronics that have to be conjured to make this latest technomadic dream come true.

In other news...

After a recent posting about house-lab networking, two readers have asked me to provide more detail about the back-to-back pair of SpeedStream 5851 SDSL routers that are set up to bridge the two LANs, about 1/8 mile apart through the forest. The wiring itself is just a randomly-chosen pair in one of the three 10-conductor direct-bury phone cables that we trenched 7 years ago, and phone-grade wiring was used to connect from those to convenient SpeedStream mounting locations in the buildings. We're seeing a steady 1.5 megabit/sec link over vanilla copper (which amazes me, having grown up in an era where "3 kilocycle bandwidth" was taken as gospel where phone stuff was involved).

Here are the scripts to setup the two units, using the standard telecom terminology of CO (Central Office) and CPE (Customer Provided Equipment), even though those terms are somewhat meaningless here. The one called CO is adjacent to the Router between us and the Internet:

login admin
sys name cpe
eth ip addr 192.168.0.254 255.255.255.0
eth ip enable
rem add co
# rem setproto ppp co
rem setproto rfc1483mer co
rem setpvc 0*38 co
rem disauthen co
rem addiproute 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 1 co
rem setsrcipaddr 10.0.0.1 255.255.255.0 co
sd term cpe
# turn on bridging
sd speed 1536
save
reboot

login admin
sys name co
eth ip addr 10.0.1.254 255.255.255.0
eth ip enable
eth ip defgateway 10.0.1.1
dhcp disable all
rem add cpe
# rem setproto ppp cpe
rem setproto rfc1483mer cpe
rem setpvc 0*38 cpe
rem disauthen cpe
rem addiproute 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 1 cpe
rem setsrcipaddr 10.0.0.2 255.255.255.0 cpe
# turn on bridging
sd term co
sd speed 1536
save
reboot

They are basically being simple bridges, not routing, not providing DHCP service... just a high-tech piece of wire. So far, the only glitches have been very minor, generally in response to doing something rude like unplugging one of them abruptly (whereupon the other seems to like to be power-cycled). Note that not all flavors of the 5851 like to do this; the -001 and -005 work, and some other versions can be re-flashed to fit, but some are incompatible. We bought 4 of them on eBay, plus the first that was a gift, before we had two that both worked and were compatible (I still have one that seems fine but for the fact that we can't seem to get it into password-recovery mode... the first $25 takes it.)

Cheers from the nomadhouse!