WAP 11 Power Consumption?

[Darryl Smith]

G'Day

The WAP-11 can join two LAN's, and will do this in a manner that is
cheap. Normally you would have two WAP-11 units - one connected to a LAN
at each end. The two units become effectively a piece of 10baseT
ethernet cable, with a HUB at each end. 

My idea is to do this, but to have a couple more WAP-11 units in the
middle, wired back to back. They would have a crossover cable between
them, and also be set so that they were opperating on different
channels. This is probably not the best for the ethernet timing specs,
but should not be too bad. It would be just like putting a few hubs
together.

robert scholten [rscholten2000 at yahoo.com] noted
>550mA when transmitting.

Thanks for thet Robert. Now lets think about this. We need to power two
units, each at 550mA when transmitting. That becomes 1.1A at 5V or about
6 Watts. Staying with Watt-Hours we need these units to run 24 hours a
day - or about 150 watt-hours/day. If we are doing solar, we need to
assume that there will be bad weather for 4 days in a row, meaning that
we need to store at least 600 watt-hours in a battery. Batteries should
never be fully discharged, so that should probablyly mean a capacity of
1200 Watt-hours, or about 100 Amp-hours at 6 volts.

Looking at solar for charging the battery. We need to be able to charge
at least 600 watt-hours in a single day. A bit more would be good.
Assuming mid-winter (which has little rain here in Oz) there might be 6
hours of good light, where the angle of the solar is not too low. In
those 6 hours we need to generate 600 Watt-hours. Therefore we need to
generate about 100 watt-hours per hour... 

According to Dick Smith Electronics (www.dse.com.au), Cannon have an 11
Watt solar panel for US$100, which is 1/4 meter^2 in size. Eight of
these would be about US$800 and take up about 2 meter^2. I would not use
these actual units, but for this exercise this is what I need.
Unfortunately the company that needs all this used to own part of a
solar panel research company (long story)... Mounting these might be an
issue - I may need smaller cells, and a small wind generator.
Unfortunatly Hydro is not an option.

It is likely to be a month or three before I get the opotunity to do
this work - Assuming I get to do it...

Darryl

---------
Darryl Smith, VK2TDS   POBox 169 Ingleburn NSW 2565 Australia
Mobile Number 0412 929 634 [+61 4 12 929 634 International] 
Darryl at radio-active.net.au | www.radio-active.net.au