**FIRST EMAIL**/Future of FRC - Sneak Peek

[fimmel]

i certainly hope they will not use the 2.4ghz spectrum. why not use 5.8ghz? thats used by 802.11a its not widely used with many communication devices and it would not cause tons of headaches for people with b/g/n wifi networks. remember there is the public that attends these events and some may have wireless devices (bluetooth wifi etc) and it would be hard to enforce having everyone not use wireless. then theres robot demos, parades etc. (can you imagine not being able to demo your robot in an area with wireless internet? of course they could just build some failsafes into the wireless communication (possibly adaptive frequency hopping) now that may make it so our robots could co exist with everyone.

just my opinion

...forest

[Tom Line]

There are already a lot of of devices out there that use the 802.11 wireless spectrum but do not necessarily use the same channel set up.

Remember, that's the 2.4 gHz band. For instance:

http://www.spektrumrc.com/

Just because they use the same BAND doesn't mean that have to use the same format or frequencies. The spektrum system can have as many as 40 radios acting at the same time - and each radio uses 2 digital "channels" - even their 6 and 12 channel systems only use 2 digital channels.....

Heck, all we have now is 900 Mhz radio modems.

These radios from spektrumrc are used for jets, prop-planes, helicopters, and sailboats, all on the same fields with wireless networks etc etc etc. It's not an issue. It's all in the encoding. Futaba uses the same frequencies for their setup but they employ frequency hopping. Please understand - 2.4 gHz band does not need to mean noisey and dropped connections - it just happens that home networks are set up that way.