I am just curious if a wifi usb dongle can be altered to send and receive on the ham only channels of the 2.4 ghz spectrum? I am curious because, I am looking to work with a raspberry pi zero as a mesh node. I am hoping it can turn into a very very small >25 dollar option for hams who may be interested in ARDEN but who may not pay for a ubiquiti router (of course that will have to wait until the pi zero is actually being sold at 5 bucks). I don't really think the linksys routers are really worth while because their limited memory capacity. I am not even sure if this is a worthwhile idea or even possible so, I am looking get some different perspectives from you all.
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HSMM-Pi was created for BBHN but it will work with AREDN. Just make the SSID's the same and don't operate on the channel -1 or -2 "ham only" channels.
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(I think the question was targeted more to the part 97 frequency question than will it run on the RPi.)
I've seen a few USB wifi dongles that contain an Atheros chipset, but, they were in the $25-$30 dollar range. You'd still need to write the driver to use part 97.
Besides, for around $30, you can get a Ubiquiti AirRouter
Then, you are not having to worry about:
- acquiring the right usb wifi dongle
- writing a stable driver to allow it to work on part 97 freqs
- worrying about said driver corrupting the routing on the mesh for everyone else
Also, if you wanted something outdoor rated, you can find NanoStation Loco M2's for around $40.That's my opinion.
I think more significantly, there's not really any net gain to bundle services on core devices of 'the network' when considering reliability and support issues.
The Raspberry Pi can be put on the LAN of a mesh node to host services. This is the current direction and best practice. There's another current forum thread on packaging Raspberry Pi images with pre-configured services to do this.
Joe AE6XE
I run olsrd on my home router, an Intel Atom running Debian Linux. You do have to configure /etc/olsrd/olsrd.conf to be compatible with the mesh nodes, but that's no big deal; as a reference, you can examine the olsrd.conf file on a Ubiquiti node by ssh'ing into it.
There are some definite advantages to having a general purpose Linux system as a native mesh node. It gets a full continually updated cache of the name space (kept in /run/hosts_olsr), it gets a full mesh routing table (useful for drawing network graphs, etc, with your own tools), and you can run olsr over whatever type of tunnels you prefer, not just that supported in the AREDN firmware. E.g., I have a olsr link to Mount Carmel HS over an OpenVPN tunnel that I had already set up to provide them with transparent IPv4 and IPv6 service.
Doing this on a system you already use as a router (which is what I do) is especially useful in that you can unify DNS, NAT, DHCP and routing for the regular Internet and the mesh network, allowing your local systems to use both transparently without having to loop all your Internet traffic in and back out a slow port on a Ubiquiti node.
This guy http://yo3iiu.ro/blog/?p=1301 details getting an Atheros-based TPlink dongle to use the ham-only channels.
Yes, I confirm that TL-WN722N we can use on channels below 2.4 GHz but USB dongle don't working with channel width 10/5 Mhz
I have used TL-WN722N with laptop and Linux kernel modified
thanks for the info guys
The AREDN Team's focus is on helping people implement Emcomm networks... not so much about the tinkering. You'll find the team much more willing to respond to questions from implementers. You will find lots of other sites/projects that cater to the experimenter: BBHN, HSMM-pi group, etc.
Andre