[BC] The answer...

[Bill Brister]

Ricochet, the wireless ISP, used a system like this. Ricochet went out of
business around 2001. One of their transmitters was on a light pole in my
neighorhood up until about a year ago when a development removed it. I was
on Ricochet and it worked real well. They just could not sustain the
business. Maybe someone changed the frequencies of some of their old
transmitters.

Bill B.
Houston, TX

-----Original Message-----
From: broadcast-bounces at radiolists.net
[mailto:broadcast-bounces at radiolists.net] On Behalf Of WFIFeng at aol.com
Sent: Monday, December 26, 2005 4:54 PM
To: broadcast at radiolists.net
Subject: Re: [BC] The answer...

In a message dated 12/25/2005 10:03:34 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
daaugies at juno.com writes:

> Those strange transmitters on the streetlights...
>  
>  Those might be part of an electric meter reading network.  The units on
>  the streelights are base stations and use some sort of spread spectrum to
>  communicate with the electric meters and with each other.  I thought they
>  worked at 800 MHz though.

It could have also been an early attempt at a TIS service, employing
multiple 
low-power transmitters to cover a given area.

Some time ago, someone provided a link to a company that sells these kinds
of 
low-power "repeaters" to permit Part 15 compliant emitters to be placed such

that many miles of road can be covered, or a whole town, etc. The major 
drawback of the system (IMHO) is that it uses an ISM freq in the 13Mhz band
(NBFM) 
to relay the station audio to the Broadcast-Band repeaters. (AM or FM.) They

were not cheap.

I wonder if these streetlight units we are discussing are remnants of an 
operation like this. Apparently, it went belly-up long ago and the
transmitters 
were all just left in place to rot.

Willie...

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