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11/11/2005: "The wreck of the good ship Mabuhay"

Today was the 30th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

I was 14 in 1976 when Gordon Lightfoot's ode to "a crew and good captain well seasoned" was released. It didn't get a lot of radio play, FM radio still being quite new to Las Vegas. I remember I liked the song because it was ran nearly seven minutes in length, and its tempo was great for slow dances with the girls.

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too,
T'was the witch of November come stealin'.


Ah youth.

Years later, and another November storm. This time it was 2003 and the approaching shipwreck was happening in Spokane. The investors had decimated the management, and forced what remained of the company through two layoffs in quick succession. There was a new, unseasoned captain named Stalter, and he commanded through fear and outrage, not ability.

Our ship had hit bottom.

David (Lee) Roth, nominally a VP at this point, would wander the halls, holding his little political meetings, trying everything to preserve his own job and salary as long as possible. Whenever he would meet me he would start softly singing the lyrics from Lightfoot's song:

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'.
Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya.
At Seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in, he said
Fellas, it's been good t'know ya
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

This is true. Roth knew, as I did that the damage was fatal. His plan, unlike mine was to ride the ship as long as possible, standing on corpses of his fellow sailors as necessary to keep his own head above water.

Spokane doesn't have many tech jobs, and he had a family to feed.

Vivato appears to be about to release an enhanced version of its outdoor AP (not switch, AP). Vivato calls this the "VA2410 802.11b/g Outdoor Microcell". The FCCID grant date is 10/6/2005. Look at the internal pictures on the FCC site (FCC ID QLN-VA2410A).

I found this little conflict though.

The test report states: The EUT is an Outdoor Microcell 802.11 b/g transceiver. It contains two identical radios. Both can receive simultaneously, but only one can transmit at any time. The radio module is manufactured by Vivato, Inc.

Lets take the second statement first.

Vivato appears to have upgraded the cards in the former unit. The internal photos clearly show that they are using the Ubiquiti 2.4GHz card. Whats more, some of the photos are copies of photos used in Ubiquiti's FCC filings using prototype cards. (FCCID SWX-SR2)

I think the evidence is clear that the "radio module" is not "manufactured by Vivato, Inc."

Now lets take the "only one (radio) can transmit at a time" statement. First, and most damning, Vivato's own User Manual, filed with the FCC submittal, claims otherwise:

"Allows simultaneous 802.11b and 802.11g operation using two separately configurable radio interfaces." (page 18)

And, while the various documents assert that there are filters on board, these can't be channel filters, since: ""The VA2410 can communicat on any two channels in the IEEE channel set (although the default channel assignment of 1 and 11 should be used for best results). Both channels can operate at the maximum data rate of up to 54 Mbps." (page 17)

I also love how the install suppliment to the Users Manual stresses cross-polarization of the antennas.

Second, I can tell (but I know too much) just by looking at the pictures that the requisite logic used to control simultaneous transmission is not on the board. The CPU board (the one with the miniPCI sockets) is produced by Senao, and as already discussed, Ubiquiti supplies the radio cards. Vivato's contributions are the case, and the lightning isolation board. Even most of the software comes from Devicescape.

This from the company that two years ago had advanced and proven the radical idea of using phased array techniquies with Wi-Fi.

The only reason this unit may not transmit on both radios simultaneously is that the first radio that transmits quite likely sets CCA on the other radio. This is a pure artifact of the RF layer, no "engineering" was needed to obtain this result. However, as people inside Vivato well know, even this doesn't stop the real issue which happens when one radio is receiving and the other decides to transmit. Stopping this (and the beamformer used in the 11g "base station" prodcut), is a large part of Vivato's technical "art", but it is unused in this product.

This makes the second radio worse than useless.

This is Vivato's first new product since the outdoor 802.11g basestation was announced a year ago. When all you can produce in a year is this kind of trivial upgrade you're already found to be sitting too low in the water as the Three Sisters approach.

They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.