I recently installed the 'Chazzg' brand PC in my car. It works/looks flawless with the 7" Xenarc touchscreen. What I would like to have is wireless internet access from the car. I have verizon as my cellphone provider, and I'm not sure if they provide wireless internet access in Jacksonville. For now, all I need is something which will let me connect wirelessly to the internet, while I'm parked in my garage, so I can download the album/track names of the cd's I'm copying onto WMP. An option is to use the wireless routers (btw, I have cable modem at home).
My question is, what is the range of these wireless routers? The distance between my home computer and my garage is approximately 250 feet. I live on the 2nd floor in an apartment building, hence the long distance. Any help regarding this, or any other suggestion is appreciated. Thank you.
For anyone who has some disposable cash, I must say, go ahead and get this setup. I am running the Delorme Street Atlas nav software, and just the coolness factor is incredible!! WMP and DVD looks/sounds great too. I have the PC audio hooked up thru the Pioneer XM receiver, instead of thru a modulator, resulting in more dynamic sound.

 

I just picked up the D-Link wireless router for $80 at best buy with a $20 rebate because my linksys took a **** after the blackout here in michigan. The range is great, but it really depends on where the router is and where you mount the antenna in your Z. I would recommend an antenna that will mount on the outside of the car, if you do that it will work for sure. Off the top of my head i think the 802.11b range is 800-1000 feet if thier is nothing between the points. Make sure you enable wep on the router and disable broadcasting of your ssid so that it is secure.


What power supply comes with that PC from chazzg box? I am looking for a dc to dc psu for my Z pc that will automatically tell windows to power down when i turn off the ignition. I can't find one!

 

What do you mean when you say "there's nothing between the points"? I'll have to do some research if the wireless antenna can be duplexed with the radio antenna that is on the car body. I very rarely listen to the local stations, because I have XM, so I can probably use the external antenna for the wireless internet.

Chazzg is using an Opus power supply, which has a micro-controller allowing you to designate a shutdown delay of 20 mins, 60 mins etc using jumpers. I have mine set to 20 minutes, ie. the power to the PC is not turned off when I turn off the ignition. After 20 minutes, if I haven't turned the ignition back on, the PC does a graceful shutdown. It's good for beer runs etc, and it works flawlessly, but I think the powersupply itself was something like $200. You can PM chazzg, and get the details. Or, his PC is listed in the classified section, you can look it up.

 

Your car antenna is tuned to 100MHz and 802.11b is 2.4GHz. Your car antenna would not work very @ 2.4GHz. Also, the coaxial cable that runs to your car antenna might be a different impendance than the external antenna port on your 802.11b card (resulting in poor energy transfer)

 

yep, you cannot use your car radio antenna. Its totally different. I need a good power supply but thier is no way I'm paying that much for one!

I mean nothing in between the antennas, physically. If you stand in between the antennas you will block the rf.

 

250ft is likely going to be too much for anything resembling a reliable connection. I have problems sometimes just going to the other end of my house (WAP is in the garage with my server, at one end of the house).

 

you will attenutate it some what, but if by "block" you mean no signal can pass, then I think that might be inaccurate. RF generally will have multiple paths to the receiving antenna and attenuating one doesn't necessary stop ability to receive the signal. Think about standing between your car antenna and the radio tower, does your radio lose reception? Probably not except in the most extreme low signal level condiitons.

PS. I'm an RF guy so any questions on the subject are welcome.

Another wireless internet solution is to use your existing Verizon account and get a PCMCIA card that will work over the cell towers. Verizon and Sprint (heck, all the major Wireless carriers) sell them.

 

yeah, something I was reading a while back measured the 2.4 ghz wifi in that manner. I dont know. Sprint has the vision service for $10 a month unlimited data transfer. the catch is they only want you to use it on your phone. but if you pickup a snapsync cable from radio shack for your sprint phone it turns the phone into a modem. And its not like the crap analog over digital they used to have, its a direct digital ppp connection to thier bandwith. And its unlimited and does not use your bandwith. I get about 5k-15k on average. Its fast enuf to listen to 128k internet radio stations while I drive, but it does cut out once and a while. Its great for $10 a month! I just use the wifi to copy music or transfer large files to and from work. Ali G says, is nice! i like!!

 

One of the inherent flaws in Wireless networking is that You MUST Broadcast your SSID or else you will not be able to connect to the router. There is no way around that. The only option for security (other than WEP) is to enable MAC filtering and only allow the MAC address from your Wireless NIC card access to the network. There are of course dangers in wireless networking (Search for "Man in the middle attack" on google or other search engine). Good luck and let us know how it works.

-Chris

 

You don't need to enable SSID broadcasting.
There are two types of polling, active and passive.
Most cards do active polling, in which they send out probe requests on a certain SSID&channel and wait for AP responses. Some cards are passive and look for the AP beacons to connect.
If you turn the AP SSID off and your card SW or OS normally lists APs it sees, the AP SSID won't be there then of course. You just need to setup the profile manually.
MAC filtering is a good idea for basic security. But if they want to get in, it's easy to spoof a MAC address.
Some APs and cards have a RF jack for external antennas which can greatly increase your range. Most retail NIC/AP combos will have trouble with 250ft unless if it's line of sight.

 

Holy cow guys...all this tech talk is making my head spin!!
But it's all good. I am a techi guy, but more in software
I looked at wardriving.com, and it seems I need to have linux running, for the opensource software, but I am running XP Pro on my Z PC.
Can someone tell me which card to get, maybe post a link to it? And is it true that I have to have linux running to do 'wardriving'? And how effective is it? I mean...I can't be driving all around town sniffing.
The 'Chazzg' PC does not have a PCMCIA slot, so there has to be a USB adapter for the card I use.

I talked to Verizon (me cell provider), and the aircard from them is $100 (after discount), and the unlimited service is $79/month, which is way way more than what I want to spend on this thing.

Unless someone can point me in the right direction for the wardriving, I might just get a wireless router, get a wireless NIC card with USB adapter, and sit in my garage and load CD's onto WMP.

 

350ed, at home I run a Linksys Wireless-B network (http://www.linksys.com/products/prod...id=34&prid=536) and tried and tried to connect without enabling the SSID broadcast but couldn't. About a month ago I was in my Microsoft Net+ class (going for MCSE) and I asked the instructor about it. He said that with about 90% of the wireless products available to consumers today, ther is no way to connect to a wireless network without enabling SSID broadcast on the router, which was an inherant flaw in the technology. On my home setup, with SSID broadcast disabled I can "see" the router and get a 100% signal on my laptop, but I'll be damned if I can connect to it, even manually setting all the correct settings. That is why I say that it cannot be done. As far as security goes... if someone wants to get into your network, they will no matter what you do to prevent it. All you can do is make it harder for them, but nothing is hack-proof.

Ok... Shagz, check out the following 2 links. They will give you some good information:

http://www.wardrive.net/
http://www.wardriving.com/

As far as software goes, there are Windows based applications that you can run. Aerosol is a good one (http://www.stolenshoes.net/sniph/aerosol.html).

The range on most wireless routers is about 500 feet, but signifigantly less if there are obstructions between the two points in the form of walls, floors, etc. There are signal boosters that you can get as 350ed pointed out, but you are still somewhat limited in range. You wouldn't be able to drive around and still be connected to yout router if that is what you wanted to do.

That's my $0.02

-Chris

 

T-mobile has an unlimited data plan for $29.95/month. Their footprint isn't as big as Verizon's, but it is less than 1/2 the price.

 

I tried the pci to card adapter and it didn't work...

I have an Orinoco USB... seems to work pretty well. The only bad thing about the USB antenna is it doesn't have a plug for an external antenna and it's pretty big (about the size of a coke can). Netstumbler is nice software to tell you if there is a signal near you and how strong it is...It gives off a 'Bong' sound when you drive through an area with a signal.

The antenna will step down your speed the further you are away from the source....if you can get a signal the minimum speed is about 1 MB/sec with the weakest signal. With a strong signal I think it's somewhere near 22 MB/sec.

As a test I drove around with the thing plugged and was picking up tons of signals.

 

I went back to the installer today, and he installed a male/female plug on the power wires, which I can unplug and bring the PC inside. Till the wireless internet prices/options are affordable/better, I will have to live with lugging the PC indoors and hooking it up to the cable modem when I need to get to the internet, for downloads or to get album/track names into WMP.

 

250 feet should not be a problem...

Check into the Pringles can antenna to increase the range of the wireless card in your in-car PC.

On the WAP side, some of the AP's have hacks for increasing power....thus range. I have actually gotten up to 3 miles from one of the older Linksys AP's.

Most Enterprise implementations of WIFI do not broadcast SSID's. Is is possible, and a common occurance. Many of the lower-end SOHO products donot provide the funtionality, and for that reason people think it is not possible.

Security wise; do not broadcast your SSID unless you are limited by hardware to do so. Use mac authentication combined with WEP (anything over 56BIT is good for home use) and you should be fine. Straight MAC authentication is very insecure, and you should avoid it.

For "general purpose" troubleshooting with WIFI, check out the following application http://www.netstumbler.com . It is a good way to identify wireless networks, and troubleshoot range issues. Its also good for..ahh.. nevermind...