Internet at 80mph

[cos]

Last night, dahling drove me to Rensselaer. As usual, I had my laptop and cell phone to get it online. I'm not used to being the passenger on a long car ride, but I actually got work done on the mass pike! Until my battery ran low and I shut down.

Today, 6 people in a van, heading to Rochester... and they have a car AC adapter. It plugs into the cigarette lighter, and I plug my laptop into it and charge. But this time, I'm not the only one with a laptop out, so someone asks the question: "Can you let us connect to the Internet through your wireless?"

Well, yes, it turns out I can. So now three of us are online, and of course, all posting to LJ. I'm even broadcasting the SSID, so a car keeping pace with us could get on my network too. "This would be useful for a convoy" says beowabbit :)

Comments

[scromp.livejournal.com]

It was primarily used as a local network, so we could chatter on irc as we went along, and there was some project we were supposed to be collaborating on at the time which I do not remember. I did have somewhat crappy gprs that we turned on from time to time for net access, but demand was generally low since it gets kind of spotty out in the middle of nowhere.

We played with the range a good bit. We could get out to about a quarter of a mile separation (estimated) if the road was clear and flat. Any hills or intervening tractor trailers would cause an immediate disruption at that range. For normal caravan type distances it was very usable even in traffic.

The wap was in my truck, on the dash as you can see, and I usually followed the van, so there wasn't a lot of metal in between the wap and the laptops. It probably wouldn't have worked quite as well if I was leading.