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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 269 responses total. |
gull
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response 200 of 269:
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May 22 18:27 UTC 2002 |
For the range you're talking about, I wouldn't bother with parabolic dishes.
A feedhorn antenna would probably work very nicely. There are some good
construction articles on the internet for making them for 802.11 networking,
but that's 2.4 GHz. All the dimensions would have to be larger for 900 MHz.
A copy of the ARRL Handbook would have all the formulas you'd need. This
scheme is probably not legal if that's a concern for you (though you would
be unlikely to get caught.) There are limits on how much antenna gain you're
supposed to have on consumer devices like that. Using directional antennas
would reduce the chances of picking up someone else's phone on the same
channel, though.
I wouldn't run a long outdoor phone cable without thinking about lightning
protection. I'm not sure about the legality of it, either. (If I started
running phone or cable TV wires to all my neighbors' apartments and
splitting the bills with them, I suspect the phone or cable company would
have something to say about it. They may not see a difference between that
and what you're doing.)
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keesan
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response 201 of 269:
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May 22 22:45 UTC 2002 |
Is 400 feet a range that we can manage easily without a dish? We had an old
cordless phone working at that range for a while, with a long wire strung up
in our tree (I don't recall why) but it was very faint. What is a feedhorn
antenna? Our long phone cable is currently running on or under the ground.
The difference is that I am living at both the addresses and I have one phone
line that is used for making 4 calls/month for which I am paying full price
and I would like to be able to use it more often.
Tomorrow we will measure the distance from front to back of the neighbors'
properties to determine whether the fence that the phone line and tree are
on the other side of is actually the neighbor's property and if not she was
trespassing on two neighbors' properties when she cut our phone line and
removed it. In addition to having an illegal sign and business.
We have several cordless phones and will pick the one with the longest
range and work on improving that. Thanks for any suggestions. Do the 900
phones generally have longer ranges than the older ones? Jim says the battery
is 3.6 V and we can feed it a bit more than that with an adaptor (4-4.5).
Amazing how much trouble you have to go to to use Windows computers. ;)
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gull
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response 202 of 269:
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May 23 12:51 UTC 2002 |
A horn antenna is a type of waveguide device. It looks like a can or metal
duct with one open end, sometimes with the opening flared outwards. It's
fed with a small 1/4 wave stub antenna inside, usually a quarter wavelength
in from the closed end if I remember right. The signal is concentrated
towards the open end, instead of radiating in all directions, so you get a
few decibels of gain in the direction it's pointed. The exact gain depends
mostly on the length of the horn and the shape of the open end. For 2.4 GHz,
I've seen them made out of tin cans or Pringles tubes. (My usage of
'feedhorn' before was probably incorrect; I think they're only called
'feedhorns' when they're used at the focal point of a dish, to 'feed' it a
signal.)
If you simply put a longer wire on the phone, try to make it a multiple of
the antenna length that's already there.
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scott
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response 203 of 269:
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May 23 13:06 UTC 2002 |
I just did a quick Google search for "antenna length calculator". I don't
know what the frequencies of Sindi's phones are, but here are some common
values:
49MHz (older and cheaper phones): 1/2 wave: 9.55 feet, 1/4 wave: 4.77 feet
900MHz (newer phones): 1/2 wave: 0.52 feet, 1/4 wave: 0.26 feet
2.4GHz (really new phones): 1/2 wave: 2.34 inch, 1/4 wave: 1.17 inch
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cmcgee
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response 204 of 269:
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May 23 13:47 UTC 2002 |
Sindi, before you threaten to report your neighbor for skirting the laws,
you might want to consider your position if anyone ever reported that you
are paying for a pulse line, but using the tone line capability. You might
lose your cheap phone service in a hurry if they monitor your use.
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keesan
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response 205 of 269:
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May 23 15:08 UTC 2002 |
Who said I was using a pulse phone as a tone phone??????? I meant that I was
paying the full monthly charge for a phone that I make only a few calls on
a month, and I would like to have more use of the line I am paying for.
CAN you phone out on a pulse phone with tones? Ours all have little switches
that you use when you hit a menu such as those inflicted on us by the phone
company (In order to better serve you, we have updated our menu system.
There are five items on the menu. If you are calling about your home phone
press.......). Except for one with a button that you hit in order to switch
temporarily from pulse to tone.
Once in a while we get an incoming call from some solicitor. We got
one call, total, on the line we ran, before it was cut. Someone wanted us
to give them money and had random-generated our number. Jim says we get 1-2
solicitations per day on that phone. Since the phone company insists on
publishing our number (unless we pay them not to) we cannot stop this easily.
Jim has five cordless phones lined up charging and we will measure how
far you can hear and talk on each of them before investigating better
antennas. We have a house antenna built in (1920s, for radio?) that runs up
to the roof at my apartment, and can run a long wire to MY tree at the other
place as an antenna like we did before we had phone service there. (I would
yell into the phone - give me your number and I will call you back!!!!!).
What factors influence the range of a phone? The city does not know of any
regulations against putting phone wires in trees. I think a tall tree would
be a much better lightning conductor than a little skinny wire that reaches
only partway up into it.
The phone company used to let people at two addresses share the same phone
line - it was called a party line. We put one half of a party line in the
new house and were going to install the other half at the old house but
suddenly they stopped selling party lines (so we have no other party). They
can make more money selling two regular lines. There is also no reason they
could not let someone use the same phone number at two places as they allow
it for 45 days. They would rather charge more money for two lines. They are
a monopoly and can do what they like. Actually they are not a monopoly any
more - I may check out their competitors' rules. Who else besides Comcast
now offers local phone service? I hear you can keep your old phone number.
Two party lines cost not much more than one regular line - I pay $12/month
with pulse dial and limited calling (44 calls). I would have been happy to
pay another $12 for the other half of the party line.
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gull
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response 206 of 269:
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May 23 15:34 UTC 2002 |
Re #205: MCI and KMC both offer local phone service. The company I work for
is sticking with KMC because they told us we could keep our current phone
number when we move to our new building in a few weeks, while Ameritech told
us we couldn't. I'm not sure if they're interested in the residential
market, though; they seem to focus on businesses.
I'm surprised Ameritech won't let you have a line that rings in two
locations. When my parents lived in Chesaning my dad had a line at his
office that also rang at our house. (Though I think that was GTE.)
It used to be you could order a "dry pair" between two locations, for that
matter -- a phone wire with no power or dial tone connected. Alarm
companies used them a lot. Don't know if that's still possible or how much
it costs. (It's "dry" because it doesn't supply power -- it has no
"juice".)
The worry isn't that lightning will hit the phone wire, it's that it will
hit the tree and be induced into the phone wire. That would probably wipe
out everything in your house that's connected to your phone line. The phone
company uses grounding and lightning protection when they bring an overhead
line into a house.
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keesan
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response 207 of 269:
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May 23 16:14 UTC 2002 |
Jim thanks you for the warning - he says you mean 'grounded at the pole'.
The service itself is already grounded and were only running another extension
cord, he says. I will ask KMC and MCI and Comcast about having the same phone
number ring in two locations. He says the lightning risk is a legitimate
concern but our wire was the bottom one of at least six and would be last to
be hit and grounding would not help any as the main wire to my house would
have been hit first and nothing would protect my equipment, tho it might
prevent a fire but we are already grounded to protect us from that at the
other end.... (?).
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keesan
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response 208 of 269:
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May 23 18:05 UTC 2002 |
Jim got a bit distracted by the latest version of F-prot for DOS, which we
discovered spends half of its time looking for MS WORD/EXCELL viruses but can
be told not to do so. It is now possible to get viruses by attempting to boot
from a non-boot disk or by reading WORD files or LOTUS files. We should write
protect all our program disks and a clean boot disk.
Eventually he walked over a block and was able to dial back to this phone from
the other phone (or vice versa) but you can barely hear each other due to all
the static. Only the regular antenna. The next phone is not working.
We have not yet measured to the fence. The other neighbor who mentioned their
illegal sign said, oddly enough, it was removed yesterday from their front
window but the second sign in back is still up.
So we can go back to yelling at people who phone "Give me your number and I
will call back on the other line!!!!!!"
The public library gave me names of four places providing local phone service.
KMC is business only. Another number was wrong. One was an answering
machine. Talk American tried to read me their prerecorded speech about long
distance. I interrupted, don't want long distance. He did not give up
easily. Their long distance package is only $39.95. I don't want long
distance, do they have some way to make the same account (number) work at two
addresses. No. How about their $29.95 local and regional long distance
service? No, I pay about $20 now. Don't I phone my friends and family long
distance? No, they are all dead. What long distance service do I use now?
Qwest. They are a great service but we are cheaper, only 3.9 cents/minute
and no monthly fee. But there is a $5 minimum. I pay 5 cents and no fee or
minimum. But we are only 3.9 cents...... I don't want long distance, do you
have just local. You will save a lot of money by using our $39.95 service.
Jim was going hysterical in the background. I finally hung up on him, having
determined that there was no way to stop the spiel. They also tried at least
three times to determine which additional services I was using. None, don't
want any. How about call waiting. No........ We should have recorded this
as a comedy routine.
We will measure where the middle of the street is after Jim gives blood at
Detroit Edison (before 3). Maybe they give out those little Edison mints?
The banks had homemade cookies.
I am slowly upgrading my non-Windows office. The printer is now occupying
the top of the file cabinet so I don't need to get up and walk around the
dresser to use it, and the fax machine has moved to the top of the new shelf.
The convertor that plugged into the duplex grounded outlet to give six outlets
but was always falling out (so that I had to reset fax and answering machine)
has been replaced by a power strip on a long cord. I wonder why the
all-in-one printer-copier-fax-faxphoneswitch from Canon does not have an
answering machine and telephone built in. We will try it as fax when the
inkjet ink arrives. My Canon inkjet printer takes different ink from that
used by the insurance agent. The refill guy says the companies all designed
their cartridges to make them difficult to refill so they could sell more,
but I don't know why one company uses two or more inks.
I suspect my landlord (who goes to the same church) talked to the neighbor's
husband about the sign. Maybe he also got our phone cord back. If not, we
will be discussing this trespassing issue with the two neighbors who let us
use their yard.
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gull
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response 209 of 269:
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May 23 18:13 UTC 2002 |
> Don't I phone my friends and family long distance? No, they are all
> dead.
I'll have to try that one on people who call trying to sell me long
distance service. ;)
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keesan
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response 210 of 269:
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May 23 18:17 UTC 2002 |
I tried that one AFTER he asked how much I spend on long distance -
$1-2/month- and he kept insisting I would save money with their service, which
is $5/month minimum. Several times. These people do not listen.
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gull
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response 211 of 269:
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May 23 19:08 UTC 2002 |
They aren't paid to listen.
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mdw
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response 212 of 269:
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May 23 22:00 UTC 2002 |
There are various rules & regulations that apply to a "common" carrier
who puts wires across your property. I think most of these don't apply
to wires you run within your property, or with the permission of your
neighbors. As a general rule, wires on trees is frowned upon, but there
are whole bunch of practical reasons why this is so (it's not good for
the tree, the tree might break & drop the wire, etc.) If you & your
neighbors don't mind, then this isn't an issue. So far as lightening
protection goes, if there are no wires above yours, then some standard
precautions include running a ground line above your signal lines, and
installing lightening protection at each end. At home I have something
that says what IBM recommends - they're likely to go overboard to
minimize risk. The power company might prefer you not run your line
directly under yours, and might cut it if they find it - the issue here
is that if their line comes down and shorts out against your line, they
might be liable for any resulting harm to you or yours. I believe you
can avoid most all of these issues if you bury your line instead - then
the only issue is getting below the frost line, if you can, to avoid
freeze/thaw related damage.
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keesan
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response 213 of 269:
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May 24 02:47 UTC 2002 |
Plumbing has to go below frost line. Electric power cables from the post to
your house have to go 24" deep. We put ours in conduit but that is not
required. The depth is so that nobody will dig through them (as Jim
discovered when he dug through the phone line to his garage). You can put
your own conduit in. Frost-line is 42" (that is how deep the bottom of the
footing has to go).
Tim was kind enough to go out this afternoon with his new 900 MHz bargain
phone and walk around talking to himself while being recorded on our answering
machine. IT came in loud and clear most of the distance, and only at about
250-300' was there a bit of static (at that point I am not sure quite what
he was talking about but it was far better than the faint bit of Jim's voice
that I could hear with the older phone at 300'). It works better without a
house in the line of sight, trees are not bad. If our friends will return
the base that we accidentally gave them as an extra recharger along with a
900MHz phone, so we can use it with our phone (we kept the wrong base) we will
try our 900MHz phone, or see what Kiwanis has in its $2 untested boxes.
We can run antennas up to the roofs of both houses, or hook onto the house
antenna that comes down through the wall but that does not seem to be working.
I doubt that the neighbor is going to succeed in getting the city or Ameritech
to remove any wires that we run up to an antenna on our own roof.
Tomorrow we measure to her fence and then maybe report to two of her neighbors
that she has been removing things from their properties because she does not
like to look at them. We have a replacement wheel for one neighbor's
grandson's bike (that he ran over) and will talk to him when we bring it over.
Jim just made it to the Edison blood drive and was last there and they let
him take home some of the leftovers such as a banana and some orange juice,
and the Chamber of Commerce has moved there and gave him a free bike map and
a nifty black velvet bag (maybe big enough for scrabble pieces) with a clever
little metal box in it that opens if you push on the lid and closes tight of
you squeeze the sides and says Ann Arbor Chamber of Commerce Made in China,
and has a bunch of little round edible pink things in it that he can eat and
make space to keep ball bearings in afterwards, or his bike repair kit. So
he is feeling like life is treating him okay despite one stupid neighbor and
the fact that most of our cordless phones that he fixed don't seem to work.
We could possibly, after getting back our phone line and suggesting to the
neighbor that she not trespass and steal from her neighbors again, run it to
the opposite side of our street and put a cordless base in the garage there
and only have to go 100' or so via the air.
Thanks to everyone for ideas and suggestions and I will attempt to understand
the antenna descriptions if that proves applicable.
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tpryan
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response 214 of 269:
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May 24 11:19 UTC 2002 |
I didn't know you had to give blood to get Edison to put
in a power pole where you wanted it. My you all do go thru some
extrememes. ;) ;) ^ ^ say no more.
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keesan
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response 215 of 269:
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May 24 15:56 UTC 2002 |
They put it in where THEY wanted it (in the middle of our compost pile) before
Jim gave blood, but it took 8 months of phone calls to make it happen and they
showed up when THEY wanted (three days before they said they would and we were
not ready). The plumbing line had to go 5' (not 42") underground. Jim dug
under the sidewalk with a posthole digger for that one and the city could not
figure out how he got such a small hole dug. It is to keep it not only from
freezing but from making the cold water too cold. Winter ground temperature
(water temperature) is about 50 degrees at 5'.
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keesan
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response 216 of 269:
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May 24 22:11 UTC 2002 |
We just did an informal survey of the property across the street so she knows
where to do her native plant plantings. It has a 23'x15' chunk attached to
the main rectangle because 20 years ago someone split the original property
so as to keep a large apple tree (no longer there). We found one existing
stake and measured from that, and according to that measurement the hedgerow
that we put our phone wire inside of is in some spots on the property line
and in others slightly inside it. We will now measure from a closer existing
stake that another neighbor just called to tell us about - most likelythere
will be a 2' discrepancy as surveyors were not all that exact back in the
1830s, carrying around their chains. On Spring St. the front property lines
appear to be 27" in from the sidewalk and on that side of Hiscock 7". One
property line goes right through the middle of a tree that was probably
planted 20 years ago. The 'fence' in question was at one point woven wire,
and also (at the same time?) white-painted picket (some of them are still
vertical). There is another small section of something iron, and two
different sizes of aluminum window screens (not two sizes of mesh, two
different window screens, one probably from a casement and one from the
standard type of storm window). The collection is not anchored by anything
we can see other than the weed trees. Typical in this area. The wire that
we put in was a foot or so on the side of this hedge where we had permission
and the rules are that after you have been using a property (mowing the lawn)
for 15 years (17?) it becomes yours and this had been 40 years.
We will measure next from the nearer stake.
We met a waist-high neighbor out taking his grandmother (from Ecuador and DC)
to the park who helped hold the end of the tape measure (he and Jim measured
all sorts of irrelevant things) and he also got to climb into our new attic
and trim some weed elms for another neigbhor. We met the neighbors on the
corner who have been telling us they want bikes and they filled the short
neighbor's water backpack. They will come fix up bikes for themselves. We
saw a scared-looking small grey mouse in the grass. Jim tried out another
older cordless phone. I think we need a 900 MHz one. He is back to F-PROT.
We have to bring over the replacement 24" wheel. Some day we will build
house again.
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keesan
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response 217 of 269:
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May 25 03:03 UTC 2002 |
We got the same results measuring from both stakes, surprisingly.
I will check Kiwanis for 900 MHz phones, since of the two that we had and
fixed, we gave one to a friend and the other is not acting fixed any more.
Tim, did you say a new one was $10?
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tpryan
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response 218 of 269:
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May 25 16:32 UTC 2002 |
Yes, a Bell South 900Mhz phone can be had at Best Buy (and probably
other places) for $10. Simple cordless functions (memory, redial) no
Caller ID.
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keesan
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response 219 of 269:
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May 26 15:10 UTC 2002 |
Bell South is the cheapest type made but from your experimentation it appears
to do what we need it to do. An intercom would be nice but not needed. We
will check out Kiwanis first - they have been trading us small things with
little sales value for our repairs on big expensive CD-players. Cordless
phones are now running $2 each untested, which makes your Bell a better buy
since it is the price of a known good battery and those at Kiwanis usually
need new batteries. We fixed one out of three CD boomboxes (the one with
the good CD but bad tape decks) and will trade it in.
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keesan
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response 220 of 269:
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May 27 21:15 UTC 2002 |
Does anyone know how we can get a PCI video card with 2M RAM and VESA 2.0 with
ET4000 chip on it, made in Mexico in 1996 by or for STB (which also makes
video cards for Gateway) to display text in 132 column mode? We have the
Tseng ET4000 vmode.com file which works on our older Tseng video cards (that
display 256 colors only, this one goes to 16 million at 1024 res). I could
find lots of Windows drivers for this card at driverguide. Is there some mode
command that should work with VESA compatible cards? We have one specific
to Cirrus (clmode) which is Vesa 1.2 compatible.
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mdw
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response 221 of 269:
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May 28 01:12 UTC 2002 |
6 year old card? Well, it's a cinch it's not in any A^2 stores.
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keesan
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response 222 of 269:
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May 28 13:56 UTC 2002 |
We don't want to buy the card, just make it display 132 columns VGA mode, like
the older Tseng cards did with vmode.
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keesan
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response 223 of 269:
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May 28 23:15 UTC 2002 |
Turns out there are three different vmode.com files. One works only for
Diamond Speedstar video, it says. I downloaded et4utl.zip (1992) and that
one has a nice font editor program but crashes my computer when I run it.
On the hard drive that was copied from the one that came with the IBM computer
that Bruin donated (and we used for a few years) we found a zipped tseng vmode
file containing a vmode.com file that WORKS! Many thanks again, Bruin.
We set up the ATT pentium 90 from Tim Ryan with the innards from a Gateway
486 with 1.2M hard drive, 8X CD-ROM drive, S3 video card, and 16-bit ALS sound
card, 16M of RAM from the Gateway and 16 more from the Zenith I am replacing,
and the original floppy drive and motherboard. The HD had Win95 and when
transplanted it insisted on recognizing all the hardware over again including
serial ports, then the sound and CD-ROM drive were not working but they
probably did not to start with as there was no autoexec.bat file (or maybe
you only need that for DOS). Jim made some guesses at things and now we
cannot run Windows. It used to just complain about the video card (apparently
it lost all record of it and thefiles it is looking for are not there to
install from), but now it tells us:
Invalid VxD dyanmic link call from alopI(07) + 00000070 to device "3652",
service 1.
Your Windows configuration is invalid. Run the Windows Setup program again
to correct this problem.
(We cannot find a Setup Program on the computer or in the book).
What next? Is there some line in some file that got corrupted? Can we
reinstall Windows from the CD-ROM (from DOS, that part works) or by
transferring the CAB files from another computer? Can Win95 be reinstalled
over the older version and if so which file are we supposed to replace?
Also can you install Win31 on the same computer as Win95 (so I don't need to
keep one computer with Win31 solely for use with a scanner and printer).
I found the files needed to install the video card and sound card. The BTC
CD-ROM drive says it is ATAPI - do I choose Mitsumi, Mitsubishi, or Sony?
I do not 'have disk' as that was not give to us with the computer, tho we got
a complete set of documentation, very helpful to identify the hard drive.
The Tseng video runs at 80K on my P133 and at 105K on a DX4 486 - why?
Might we have set something wrong on the former? It seems very fast.
Perhaps they just don't like each other (computer and that card).
We did a fresh installation of Win95 (from CAB files) on Jim's AMD 5X86, with
very few non-required files (we did keep Dialup Networking and Defrag) and
it is under 40M. We got rid of some shortcuts and other things pertaining
to MSN and IE to save a couple of more megabytes (you tell them youdon't want
it but you get it anyway). So Win95 needs 40M, not 60M, minimum. It did not
ask for network password, and it dialed automatically after loading Netscape,
but requires the ISP password and will not save it. S3 video, from the CAB.
The Tseng PCI video card crashes my computer when I run a video diagnostic
program called Whatvga2 - only card that has done this and it did not crash
the DX4 computer when running that same program with that card. Maybe the
card and computer really don't get along well, but they do coexist.
I was sent a 600K 'jpg' that turns out to be a tif file - people are always
coming up with new formats. Two viewing programs display only the top half
of it (Compushow and SEA) while Display and Pictview display it all. Pictview
does a much nicer job of 256 color images. They are both free. Pictview is
still supported and the author is fixing bugs. www.pictview.com.
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keesan
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response 224 of 269:
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May 29 15:38 UTC 2002 |
We cabled the CAB files (different serial number) to that computer from
another one and will look for a setup.exe somewhere in there, and for the S3
drivers for Win95.
Today Jim discovered that on his other ATT Pentium it will no longer recognize
the hard drive, most of the time. He tried a different cable. Wiggling may
have helped once. And the fan was noisy. We are starting to recycle 486s-
anyone want one with 8M RAM or DX50? They are small tower cases and will hold
pentium boards.
When using CAB files from another computer with this computer, do we change
the serial number in the CAB file or on this computer (to match). Both copies
were registered by the original owner, who gave them to us (but without the
CD-ROM, who knows where that got to). You can extract the registration number
from one file using a text editor, I don't know which file. Does Win98 also
let you do this?
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