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| Clearwire & Radio Shark | | Date Created: May 27, 2006, 12:57 AM |
 Went down to the dealer and paid for a year...
This is a cool thing. Just plug the A/C cable in your Clearwire modem, plug the Cat5 from there to your computer, make sure your cmputer is set to DHCP - instant access...
The thing works throughout most of the island. I drive around with this thing plugged in just so I can see where the best spots are. Sometimes you have to tweak it around here and there for the best signal, but for the most part, it's great!
The worst spot is actually the spot where I use it the most - the Grand Wailea Ballroom. The ballroom itself is cement and steel and it's surrounded by a wall of dirt - so you have to elevate the modem in the far corner of the ballroom to get a signal to it. The best signal I've got to the Clearwire modem in there was two bars (of five)...
Once I have that signal going, I take the Cat5 and plug it into my wireless router (which is configured just to talk to my computer). So, essentially, once I have this thing setup, I can be anywhere within 500 ft of it and get a great signal - I bought super antenaes for my router...
I was kinda bummed the other day though (during Symantec). I went through the trouble of getting there early to set it up, and on the second day there was cloud cover outside. So, while my computer was getting a killer signal from the router, the router was getting a sporadic signal from the Clearwire modem...
Basically, my computer thought it was getting a great signal and didn't know that the signal was not coming from the Internet - so I never knew when I was or wasn't connected to the Internet...
While in Oahu, I had 5 bars everywhere I plugged it in! They don't even sell Clearwire over there, and I had 5 bars...
I got RadioShark because I like the idea of just pluggin this thing into my computer and using my computer as a radio. It gets the same reception as the clearwire modem, which is kinda cool cause it's smaller and easier to setup (I can test this first, before bothering to setup clearwire). If RadioShark works at the table I'm sitting at, I know Clearwire will as well. If it doesn't, I know I have to bust out the wireless router and find a good spot for the Clearwire reception...
The coolest thing about RadioShark is that you can set the cache to a certain amount of time - mine is set to 1 hour. This means that, if I'm listening to something and decide I want to keep it, I can hit a button and it will send the last hour to my iTunes (already saved in the format I want). Really cool...
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