Mobile Wireless

It has become more and more important for some to be connected even in a mobile environment. To this end we hooked up the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office with a couple of mobile systems.

The equipment:
Mobile Mark magnetically mounted omni (5dB gain)
Teletronics 500MW indoor amplifier
4' of Times Microwave LMR400
18" Times Microwave RP SMA to N-Female "PigTail" (LMR 195)
Teletronics WLAN 2Meg. wireless LAN radio card

Here I am tightening the screws that hold the amp to the "cage".

Here's what it looked like when we got it done. The Mobile Mark antenna comes with a 10' LMR240 cable so we just hooked it right up to the output port on the amp.
The amp will run on the +12vdc available in the vehicle so I just cut the wall wart off of the power lead and hooked that right up to the power feed that he had there for his cell phone.
The LMR400 runs down close to the laptop. It works out pretty nice because it can be bent into any front seat location that it needs to be in.

You can see the omni right in front of the light bar.

Here's a little bit better view of the omni. We really do need to find a way to get it up over the light bar as the range was quite different depending on weather we were coming or going ;-).

The finished product! Deputy Watkins and all.

We went out testing after this. Max range was 15 miles but I think we could have gone a bit further. He got a call and we had to cut the testing short. I'll get back out with him one of these days and we'll try some different radio cards and locations. We'll also get some speed tests done.

Max speed was about like that of the home installs (90ish K/sec ftp transers). I was also able to remotely print to my house (my wife chewed me out for that one! The printer started printing, I wasn't home and she didn't do it! hehehehe). The radio would loose connection when we dropped below a hill and come back on as soon as we came back up.

We were also able to roam from cell to cell. The radio would pick up the different essid and channel automatically. We'd have about a 30 second outage when dropping below one system till the new one picked us up. E-mail and Web surfing didn't seem to mind this much but it sure drove ICQ nuts. I'll have to find a different chat program for them I guess.

Honest officer! I don't know who would have put Napster on my laptop!!!!

Letter from Deputy Watkins