in Madision, Wis. We drove the trailer there and set it up just outside
the convention center. The originally assigned space did not work
because the satellite is not visible from there, so we moved to a
different location near the adjacent lake. This pointed out the value
of having a small, light trailer, since we could push it by hand, and
into a location where no towing vehicle could go.
Due to the presence of metal walls in the conference center, and a
pre-existing wireless network, we could not use our on-board wireless
capabilities to reach inside the building.
Instead, the technical staff there brought us out an ethernet cable, and connected us to the indoor wired network. To avoid multiple connectivity to the Internet, they also created a Virtual LAN for us, which linked the trailer, the lecture hall, and the ADEC booth in the exhibit hall. This all worked perfectly. We demonstrated the trailer's capabilities from both the lecture hall and the exhibit hall, and we conducted field trips outside to show people the trailer in person.
We have a number of nice digital
pictures of this event taken by Craig Campbell that could be made
available is there is interest.
The Outreach Scholarship National Conference will be held Oct 6-8 in
Worthington, Ohio. We went to the conference site (a Holiday Inn) to
plan and do a trial run. We will be providing the ONLY internet
connectivity for this conference. They would like to have wireless
connectivity throughout almost all the meeting rooms in the hotel. We
set the trailer up just outside a side door, and tried our high-gain
omnidirectional antenna. It penetrated inside the outer wall and to
the closest hallway rooms, but not further. We could not use our
small wireless dish antenna because it is too directional to cover
the entire hotel. Then we ran our 200' of ethernet cable from the
trailer into the hotel and into the middle of the large atrium.
There we installed our high-gain omni antenna on a tripod.
This works quite well, providing coverage to almost all the halls
and meeting rooms, and of course the lobby/atrium area, the
restaurant area etc. The only exception is one very long hallway
with several bends, and we could not reach the most distant meeting
rooms reliably. We plan to fix that for the actual event by adding a
second wireless access point and antenna near that hallway, with
perhaps a directional antenna pointing down the hall.
One fact learned from this is that exterior walls are more difficult
to penetrate than interior walls. This seems reasonable in retrospect,
since the exterior walls are thicker and made of heavier materials and
contain more metal beams.
We now can use only fixed wireless IP addresses, but we plan to install
DHCP and possibly NAT software in the trailer PC, so we can more
efficiently support users wireless-equipped PCs.
We are gaining a great deal of practical experience with these first
applications. Each event has its own unique problems to be solved.
Bob
Robert S. Dixon, Ph D, PE
Chief Research Engineer
Ohio State University, Office of the CIO
and Ohio Academic Resources Network (OARNet)
Postal address: Office Telephone: 614-292-1638
Office of the CIO
Room 451 Baker Systems Engr Lab Telephone: 614-292-7425
Ohio State University Fax: 614-292-7081
1971 Neil Ave Email: Bob_Dixon@osu.edu
Columbus, OH 43210