[luau] About Wireless LAN

[MonMotha]

Takuya Nakayama / ?? ?? wrote:
> Thnak you, Tom.  I'm trying to rephrase my Wireless LAN question.  Also I
> add more details what I'm trying to.
> 
> 
> I'm planning to make a wireless LAN access point with a single PC for an
> experimental ham radio station in Japan.  With the band plan of Ministry of
> Post and Telecomunications Japan, the channel 6 for IEEE802.11b/g also may
> use the channel frequency for the 2.4GHz ham radio band plan.  For quolifing
> as a ham radio station, the wireless LAN AP  ham radio station have to
> capable to exchange the ham radio call signs during the wireless LAN
> connection.  So I'm assuming, may modify the SSID field to exchange the ham
> radio call signs.  However, the original SSID field is used for recognaizing
> the wireless LAN AP.  And if mismatching the SSID for both the AP and
> clients PC, will not able to comunnicate between the AP and clients PC.  So
> I'm looking for the way to modifiy the Wireless LAN PC care driver and/or
> source code to change the usage of SSID field for the call sign.
> 
> If anyone know about how to do and/or what to do.  And any other idea,
> please let me know.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Takuya


I actually have a setup like this (http://www.arrl.org/hssm/) using a Lucent 
Wavelan IEEE Silver card in an old Cyrix box.  The SSID can be whatever you want 
(just turn off SSID broadcast so that passer by's won't hop on,a nd throw up a 
web page that explains the nature of the system and asks for a call sign since 
amateurs can't communitcate outside the amateur service).

For ID purposes, just set cron up to ping broadcast (255.255.255.255) with a 
ping packet that contains (as data) yourcallsign in ASCII.  In the US, at least, 
this is fully acceptable as ID.  In the US, you only need to ID once every 10 
minutes, but I ID every minute anyway (since it takes virtually zero bandwidth).

This alleviates the mismatched SSID issue (because no, you can't have two WLANs 
talk outside their SSID; that's the point of the SSID).

If you are doing a fixed link, you might want to make the SSID both of your 
callsigns (you and the other end of the link) to provide some ID in each packet, 
then still ID every minute or so.

If you really want to be ambitious, you could always ID in CW on the center 
channel, but that would require extra equipment and would probably be pointless 
(especially with SS modes) as the data ID is (at least in the US) good enough.

To set your card up as a WAP, just use the HOSTAP driver suite.  This will give 
yo a wlan0ap device, which emulates a real WAP.  You could always do ad-hoc mode 
as well (though some cards don't support real ad-hoc mode).

Listen for me on the air!  I frequently operate the station W9NAA on 20 and 10 
meters (as well as VHF if you're in the Indiana/Illinois wabash valley area).

--MonMotha