[Ham-80211] Access control suggestions

[Guillaume Filion]

"Steven Phillips" <steven_phillips at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Here's a thought.  How about we work with major
> manufacturers such as Icom (who already has wifi
> products), yaesue, kenwood, etc. to get them to
> produce a ham radio specific WiFi solution.  The
> technology would be identical to existing products.
> Only difference would be is setting the RF equipment
> to work on ham radio frequences that do not fall on
> the shared part 15 frequencies.  If they contracted
> with companies such as Orinoco, Linksys, Cisco and
> other wifi producers, there would be very little
> startup costs.  Just  a matter of firmware
> modification (I think) to use ham specific frequences.
>  If that could happen, then we would not have to worry
> about the mixup between part 15 and part 97 users.
>
> IF they can do this for under $50, even under $100, I
> could jump out and buy one.

I read an interesting article (http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/4118) about
adding support for most wireless cards to the open-source operating system
OpenBSD.

Here's the part of the article that sparked my interest:
-----
Jeremy Andrews: What exactly do you hope to accomplish with the wireless
vendors, and how quickly?
Theo de Raadt: Well, the four large vendors in the wireless space are
currently Intel, TI, Conexant/Intersil (Prism G/Javelin) and Atheros. The
first three need firmware. The Atheros does not require a firmware since it
does not have a host cpu (instead: it requires a .o object blob of code that
runs on the host machine, but reverse enginering for that is very nearly
complete).
-----

If I'm not mistaken, that means that the reverse engineering of the Atheros
"firmware" is almost complete.

The files in questions can get seen at: