initial rural range test

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 12/13/06, James Cameron <quozl at us.netrek.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 01:44:10PM -0700, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> > The big issues they had seen was that the chicken wire acts as a good
> > faraday cage for B/G ranges (do not know about newer ones) and special
> > attenuators were added to the top for wireless to work.
>
> I can't see how attenuators would have worked.  I can imagine passive
> reflectors or re-radiators might work.
>

That is because I overly spell-checked.. and antenae(sp) became
attenuator. Sorry

> Chicken wire comes in various sizes, at least three sizes here, that are
> significantly different as far as wavelength is concerned.  The sizes I
> recall are 1cm, 3cm, and 7cm diameter hexagonal openings.  It probably
> matters which sort you observed.
>

I have so far found homes with all different kinds. How it is normally
done is that someone will go to surplas and buy whats on sale. THey
then build the house with that. Many of the areas I have seen this are
below to way below the US poverty line so people make do with what
they can find when they build a place.

The richly built homes will use a standard chicken wire and wood
floors, but they are pretty much the same. A friend of mine in Peru
said he was sure they used the same sort of construction methods in
the villages he grew up in. The chicken wire was be mostly used to
keep the mud from peeling and were more in 'municipial' buildings
(schools/etc).. but if they could get spare stuff a house might have
it too.

I am guessing that this will be something that will just have to be
tested for and listed in a FAQ for people deploying when they find out
that they cant get the regional school in North-Central Mexico
mountains or Peru to work as well as listed.

> This is an evironmental consideration for deployment.
>
> For my testing, I hope to exclude it as a constant part of the test ...
> the square mesh wire in the foreground of the photographs has holes
> about 10cm square, and is only 1m high, below the height of the access
> point.  Fresnel effects will occur.
>

Oh boy I havent done Fresnel effects in 15 years. Off to get my Optics
books out.

> I suspect that there might be an inverse relationship between the
> populations that OLPC hope to help and the availability of chicken wire
> to the point that it is used in boundary and house construction.  Metal
> fabrication is expensive compared to the labour cost of house repair.

The reason I brought it up was that it was that many houses in New
Mexico are built using the same methods that were in use for hundreds
of years. I think that the addition of chicken wire has been going on
since at least the 1940's to keep the outer adobe from falling off
during freezes and such. I alos noticed in a video of some schools
being built in the Pakistan/Afghanistan regions that they were doing
something similar if the building wasnt being built out of concrete
blocks.

However, I am nothing more than an armchair expert :/



-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"