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["Alex M (Coyo)" <coyo AT darkdna.net>]

On 04/13/2013 01:21 PM, Christopher wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 12:51 PM, Alex M (Coyo) <coyo AT darkdna.net> wrote:
>
> > Do you mean unlicensed WiMAX? I could certainly do that, but Alcatel-Lucent
> > and Motorola base stations (basically WWAN access points intended for
> > mounting on a cell tower) are not exactly commodity items you can buy off
> > the shelf, and generally are something they wholesale suppliers expect you
> > to take out extensive financing for.
> >
> > Ballpark figure is several hundred thousand dollars EACH, and an access
> > tower generally needs at least nine of them. That adds up quickly, as you
> > might imagine.
> The person I was talking with, who was setting up a long range
> wireless network, might have been doing something else then. He was
> looking at some "higher power" base stations and they only cost a few
> hundred dollars a piece. My mistake, then.

I have a few friends into ham radio and wireless electronics.

I imagine it's possible (in theory) to design and cobble together your 
own radio circuits and make use of ridiculously expensive spectrum that 
way, and according to an electronic engineer friend of mine, you can 
make printed circuit boards with a sheet of black schoolboy construction 
paper and a standard 60 watt incandescent light bulb.

I'm told integrated circuits are only slightly more difficult, but from 
what I've read, if you want to make your own microcontrollers at home, 
you need a clean room, bunny suits, your own power supply, and a 
chemical deposition chamber, along with many specialized tools.

From what I've read, you also need to either acquire or refine your own 
wafers of silicon. Purifying, refining, and recrystallizing silicon and 
etching it in a clean room and chemical deposition chamber is not 
exactly trivial, and even assuming you can make all of that yourself in 
some huge ambitious DIY @ Home in your backyard project, it'll still be 
extremely time consuming and labor intensive, and still pretty 
expensive, unless you happen to be sitting on several different ore 
deposits.

In minecraft and terraria, ore is everywhere, you just have to look for 
it. No so in the real world.