20 March 2012

ks14 status update

The 14 Channel Rx-Only kismet server (I'm calling it ks14) is sort of in a holding pattern looking for a enclosure to house the radio/splitter/lna bundle. I also have others things taking up my time lately.

The Twitter feed shown to the right of this post is where I've been putting the latest pictures of the project. 

I tried a Hoffman NEMA 1 enclosure, 12x12x4, but it was way way too heavy. It felt like a firesafe, I returned it.

I need about 11" x 9.25" x 2.5"  preferably aluminum but will settle for plastic. I could rearrange things and resize the mounting board to 11x8"x3.5" or so, maybe.... but I'd rather not. I've looked around some stores for a plano tackle box or parts type organizer with no luck. Nothing seems quite right, or what seems good doesn't quite fit.

I want something relatively slim that will let the entire assembly slip into a backpack easily. I've considered going with something bigger to house the radio/splitter/lna plus a mini ITX board etc.... but that gets fairly large and I may want to connect to a desktop computer sometimes.

Anyway, I have several rack mount type enclosures that would work but they're larger than necessary. I may try to rig up something from scratch that will protect all the cables and connectors.

Oh yeah, I ordered (and received) a replacement for the Atom 330 that died. It's an ECS AMD E-350 mini-ITX motherboard. I swapped it into an an old Mobile Computing Solutions ITX case that had an ancient Via Epia-M Series motherboard in it.

From what I found, the E-350 should be around the performance of the Atom 330... maybe more.

I need to get the USB hubs mounted and setup on the splitter/radio/lna mounting board and then I can test things out while still searching for a enclosure. I was thinking I should mount more than 2 hubs to help spread the radio traffic load across more than 2 USB ports.... we'll see how many I can reasonably fit on the mounting board.

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