High altitude balloon going up tomorrow - with access point onboard!

Man.. if you did that over here I'd definitely be there.
 
What is the objective for this project?
 
802.11b AP? Yeah, that will be a disaster. I wonder if they really think more than one or two netmeeting sessions will be capable from a single .11b AP? Interesting idea. Pitifully engineered. They couldn't find an enterprise class AP even? Linksys for pete's sake. Even with Three .11g AP's you'd be limited in what you could do in terms of number of session vs. what you could be broadcasting too. In other words, if even 100 people actually associated to a multi AP setup (depending on how they publicize this there cold be thousands within range) it would bring the WLAN to it's knees, and forget about pushing images out via netmeeting. They are in for a rude awakening if they think this will be a success with a single .11b AP. It will be a trainwreck.

edit: Bahahaha. Take a look at their predicted coverage. Clearly these people have no idea what they are doing. Several states coverage? That is truely humorous.
 
I think they were expecting more people to just sign the guestbook and leave. I was never able to connect to it... as the balloon went in exactly the wrong direction for me. Obviously their predicted coverage was rather overstated, but it is still a cool project.

It appears that it followed the high/low pressure boundary, and the battery died before the balloon did. It took a southwestern trajectory and got around Clinton, MS before everything pooped out.

As for the hardware thing, I would've gone with a WRT54G, and run the HTTP and IRC servers on the balloon, and never messed with netmeeting. Remember, these are college kids that always have to make the choice of "Better hardware or more beer?"
 
Not real sure whre Lexington is in comparison to the state line but it didn't matter. The coverage might be a couple of miles either way from the launch site. Maybe, just maybe, they might could have picked up clients a little bit farther away but if it was released right in the middle of Nashville it wouldn't hit clients outside of Nashville and multi state coverage was ludicrous. Whomever came up with that had no idea what he/she was talking about.
 
Yeah, I agree that their coverage map was a little out of hand.

I wasn't in KY at the time. I was off about 20 miles away from Knoxville when they launched. I didn't go there because of the balloon, but I did bring my 200mW card and 14 db antenna for it. :) I didn't pick them up. Oh well.
 
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