WiMAX in TX (Austin, Kerrville)

[iansltx]

Working right now on getting a Clear Spot to test out WiMAX in areas near home (using "near" in the Texas sense...so draw a circle with a radius of 2.5 hours' driving time around my location). I would use my phone, but Robert has my OG Epic now I'll likely be making use of Clear's limited-time passes (day and two-hour) to do my testing, since I have a cable connection for my main 'net access that clocks in well above what I expect to see from Clear (50M down, 5M up vs. <20M down, 1.5M up).

 

Location #1 will be my apartment, roughly 1000 feet from a Clear monopole in NW Austin, as the crow flies. I'll test indoors and outdoors to see how much a wall or two attenuates my signal (probably a fair amount, since we're talking about 2500MHz here). Fun fact: this site is backhauled via microwave, according to AntennaSearch. Two 18GHz radios on three channels, plus one 23GHz radio on two channels, according to AntennaSearch. Wonder whether that will impact throughput...

 

Location #2 might be pretty much under the same cell site, to see how wide the vertical beamwidth of Clearwire's antennas are. Oh, and downtilt.

 

Location #3 will be in Kerrville, somewhere where Clear shows they have service via their Protection Site there. It may take a little while to find such a place, but I'll look for one with a good signal and do some testing. Since the site is the only one in the area, Clearwire doesn't have any wireless backhauls to elsewhere, making it harder for me to easily find the site. They also don't tell me where their tower is in that city, though it looks like it's somewhere toward the south side of town.

 

Locations #4 and above will be elsewhere where Clear has service, either in Austin (likely) or San Antonio (less likely). I may or may not test more than the three above locations, but who knows. If I do test in San Antonio, it will be on the north side of town.

[WiWavelength]

I appreciate scientific investigation. Looking forward to your measurements/observations.

 

AJ

[iansltx]

I'm posting this a couple hundred feet away from the aforementioned Location #2 WiMAX tower from my MacBook, which is connected wirelessly to my brand new (from Best Buy, $50 plus tax plus a $10 day pass) Clear Spot Voyager.

 

For some reason, when I bought the day pass, Clearwire didn't register me as having agreed to its terms and conditions, so they walled off access to everything except their own site. An hour phone call later (I hate scripted techs, and that call is one of the reasons why) I finally got 'net access.

 

Anyway, I have 'net access now via WiMAX, in pretty much the most ideal RF conditions possible. I'm in the low -50s on the RSSI front, with a CNR (SNR?) of 32-35 (I assume numbers are in dB or dBm, as appropriate). To give you an idea of how clean my path is (clear line of sight, actually), the Clear Spot's transmit power on the WiMAX side is dialed down to -14 to -18 (I assume dBm). We're talking about tens of microwatts here!

 

Also, the Clear Spot can't "hear" any other Clear WiMAX towers; everything in the Neighbors list (I love the field test stats on this thing!) has effectively zeroed out SNRs (-16) and RSSIs (-103). Side note: there is a Bandwidth column in the table that shows neighboring base stations, and in all cases the readout is 10,000. Wonder whether that means there's 10 Mbps of total bandwidth per base station, or whether it's a 10MHz carrier. In any case, those base stations aren't interfering with me.

 

But what about performance?

 

Better than 3G, but not as good as LTE. Not nearly as good. Then again, this is a device that I bought for $50 unsubsidized...I could've had it for $25 if I bought a month of service along with it online.

 

Anyway, all traffic appears to be routed through Houston onto Level3 there, from here in Austin. A bit odd, since Clearwire could've just as easily pushed everything up to Dallas to shave off some latency, but then again the DHCP pool I'm pulling from is Houston, so i guess the AUS market is lumped in with HOU. i'll only share one traceroute because there's nothing special going on here:

 

 

traceroute to google.com (74.125.227.40), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 [AS8151] clearspot (192.168.1.1) 5.438 ms 2.566 ms 2.234 ms

2 [AS16586] 71-20-64-2.hou.clearwire-wmx.net (71.20.64.2) 89.581 ms 88.747 ms 94.783 ms

3 [AS16586] 64-13-74-161.hou.clearwire-wmx.net (64.13.74.161) 90.009 ms 93.934 ms 89.748 ms

4 [AS3356] xe-11-2-0.bar1.houston1.level3.net (4.78.14.25) 95.747 ms 95.027 ms 88.411 ms

5 [AS3356] ae-13-13.ebr1.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.137.138) 95.062 ms 103.476 ms 99.873 ms

6 [AS3356] ae-71-71.csw2.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.151.137) 110.222 ms

[AS3356] ae-91-91.csw4.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.151.161) 98.986 ms 98.232 ms

7 [AS3356] ae-1-60.edge2.dallas3.level3.net (4.69.145.12) 95.522 ms

[AS3356] ae-3-80.edge2.dallas3.level3.net (4.69.145.140) 98.993 ms

[AS3356] ae-4-90.edge2.dallas3.level3.net (4.69.145.204) 103.509 ms

8 [AS3356] google-inc.edge2.dallas3.level3.net (4.59.36.14) 106.451 ms 98.722 ms 104.813 ms

9 [AS15169] 72.14.233.65 (72.14.233.65) 105.238 ms 98.129 ms 105.043 ms

10 [AS15169] 209.85.250.77 (209.85.250.77) 105.063 ms 82.747 ms 115.479 ms

11 [AS15169] dfw06s06-in-f8.1e100.net (74.125.227.40) 109.382 ms 88.545 ms 110.170 ms

 

You'll note that pings on that route are all over the map, ranging from high 80s to low 110s. I've seen latency dip to high 50s or hit higher than 120ms, a far cry from the quality of service I've seen on T-Mobile's HSPA+, or VZW/Sprint's LTE, networks. But hey, it's cheap, right? And, all in all, not bad for a tiny hotspot (it's slightly thicker than my S3, slightly narrower and 60% shorter...but that's been covered already).

 

What about speeds? Glad you asked. I hate to say it, but it looks like there's either backhaul or last-mile congestion on the site. Can't tell which, since I don't know how many folks in my apartment community are using Clearwire as their home internet, but color me confused when I get a large deviation in speed tests, second by second, on the connection's downstream side. Speed tests (I'm using Time Warner Cable's Austin speedtest since it's lightly loaded and bottleneck-free over to Clear) will bounce between 6 and 8.5 Mbps on the download side over the length of a test, settling somewhere in that area at the end. Upload speeds are within 100 kbps of 1.5 Mbps. Keep in mind that all these speeds are during a period where the network isn't terribly loaded: 10-11pm. I'll do more tests tomorrow.

 

You might be wondering why I didn't break out speedtest and latency numbers by location. Well, the difference between being 150 feet from the tower and 1000 feet translates to no discernable difference in performance. Heck, standing closer to the monopole's base than the antenna cluster still didn't kill speeds much, though transmit power jumped into the milliwatt range and SNR went down as low as 15 at that point. Which is crazy, considering the rather broad vertical beamwidth and downtilt that those antennas must have to allow any kind of service that close.

 

At location #1, inside I hovered around 0 dBm Tx power and high twenties SNR, with an RSSI in the mid -60s...and speeds were comparable to when I moved the Clear Spot out to the patio, where SNR improved by a few decibels, RSSI jumped into the mid -50s and Tx power stayed in the negative dBms. Note that the difference between outside and inside was maybe ten feet of airspace and a sliding glass door (likely without an energy-efficient, RF-destroying coating).

 

I'll do some tests tomorrow when network load conditions are different (i.e. most people in the tower's footprint are at work or at school rather than at home). I don't expect better speeds or latencies, but I could be wrong. This WiMAX experience has been an interesting one...though the real fun will be when, a few weeks from now, I go hunting for the protection Site in Kerrville.

 

EDIT: Ooh look, 9.13 Mbps!

 

EDIT 2: The network is faster and more reliable when it's unloaded...getting 80-90ms pings more ofteh than not at 1am, with sustained speeds a bit north of 7 Mbps on testmy.net, 9 Mbps on other speedtests and bursts to 10-12 Mbps for brief periods on some speed tests. Not sure if I trust those speedtests though. Also, realize that this is an outside case for this tower: perfect signal, minimal load, tethered via USB to a Clear Spot. Maybe the only thing better would be to have a full-sized home modem doing the tests, but that would make field testing a heck of a lot harder.

Edited August 30, 2012 by iansltx

[WiWavelength]

I'm posting this a couple hundred feet away from the aforementioned Location #2 WiMAX tower from my MacBook, which is connected wirelessly to my brand new (from Best Buy, $50 plus tax plus a $10 day pass) Clear Spot Voyager.

 

Good stuff. We definitely appreciate your report.

 

Anyway, I have 'net access now via WiMAX, in pretty much the most ideal RF conditions possible. I'm in the low -50s on the RSSI front, with a CNR (SNR?) of 32-35 (I assume numbers are in dB or dBm, as appropriate). To give you an idea of how clean my path is (clear line of sight, actually), the Clear Spot's transmit power on the WiMAX side is dialed down to -14 to -18 (I assume dBm). We're talking about tens of microwatts here!

 

Like LTE, WiMAX is a variable bandwidth, OFDM based airlink, so RSSI is not an ideal measure -- it will always be a bit inflated.

 

"CNR" is referring to carrier to noise ratio, measured in dB. And, yes, it is basically interchangeable with signal to noise ratio.

 

Transmit power is frequently measured in dBm (dB above 1 milliwatt). So, true, -14 dBm is ~40 microwatts.

 

Also, the Clear Spot can't "hear" any other Clear WiMAX towers; everything in the Neighbors list (I love the field test stats on this thing!) has effectively zeroed out SNRs (-16) and RSSIs (-103). Side note: there is a Bandwidth column in the table that shows neighboring base stations, and in all cases the readout is 10,000. Wonder whether that means there's 10 Mbps of total bandwidth per base station, or whether it's a 10MHz carrier. In any case, those base stations aren't interfering with me.

 

The "Bandwidth" metric is referring to WiMAX carrier bandwidth. Most carriers are 10 MHz TDD. But I have found a somewhat rare 5 MHz TDD carrier on at least one site in Kansas City. I have talked at length with Robert about this seemingly unusual carrier, but I do not believe that I have posted about it. So, here are a few RF spectrum analyzer captures:

 

 

The first sweep is of the entire BRS/EBS 2600 MHz band. At this location, you can see three WiMAX carriers: a 10 MHz carrier ~2530 MHz, the aforementioned 5 MHz carrier ~2575 MHz, and a faint 10 MHz carrier ~2630 MHz.

 

The second sweep is a zoomed in look at the 5 MHz TDD carrier.

 

AJ

[iansltx]

Makes sense.

 

I was somehow under the impression that Clearwire was rolling out 5MHz TDD channels to start with. But that was probably an artifact of me muddling my head while reading up on 802.16 systems that I could personally deploy in 3.65GHz (most of them at the time were 802.16d, with 3.5 and 7MHz TDD channel widths).

 

I wonder what Clearwire has the D/U ratio on its TDD carriers set as these days; I'd imagine that there was a whole lot of airlink capacity on that 10MHz carrier but backhaul for some reason was the limiting factor. Which is odd, since Clear was running around talking about how awesome their wireless backhauls were, using gear from the likes of E-Band ($25k per gigabit symmetric link). Apparently not...

 

By the way, typo in your post...last paragraph. Should be TDD, not FDD.

[WiWavelength]

By the way, typo in your post...last paragraph. Should be TDD, not FDD.

 

Most likely, yes. Thanks, I have corrected it. But it may have been something of a Freudian slip. For some additional background, the anomalous 5 MHz carrier comes from a site literally across the street from the Sprint Campus in Overland Park. Robert and I were initially intrigued that this might be a 5 MHz LTE TDD or FDD test carrier in BRS/EBS 2600 MHz spectrum. But I could not locate any further evidence to substantiate that hypothesis.

 

AJ

[S4GRU]

Ahhh, yes. I still wonder if the 5MHz WiMax carrier may be more common than we realize. If we could just ship out a few hundred SA's around the country to some of our more geeky members and do some testing!

 

Robert via CM9 Kindle Fire using Forum Runner

[WiWavelength]

Ahhh, yes. I still wonder if the 5MHz WiMax carrier may be more common than we realize.

 

I fully suspect that you are right and that the location across from the Sprint Campus is little more than coincidence. I need to get out and do more BRS/EBS 2600 MHz sweeps before Clearwire starts paring down any WiMAX bandwidth to make way for TD-LTE.

 

If we could just ship out a few hundred SA's around the country to some of our more geeky members and do some testing!

 

Just create a new $1000 Gigante Supremo Sponsor level, and we could probably make that happen.

 

 

AJ

[S4GRU]

Just create a new 1000 Gigante Supremo Sponsor level' date=' and we could probably make that happen.

 

 

AJ[/quote']

 

"Become a S4GRU Gigante Supremo Sponsor and get your own spectrum analyzer. Donate today!"

 

Robert via CM9 Kindle Fire using Forum Runner

[iansltx]

Just took a look at Clear's coverage map in my area. Wow...they have 29 sites in one screen worth of map in north Austin, where a screen is defined by their parameters, zoomed out as far as I can before I lose the site locations. Several sites are less than a mile from another site. It's phenomenal how dense you have to get on 2500MHz to cover an area.

 

Once my laptop finishes charging, I'll have a look at two more sites in my area, both of which have wireless backhaul links installed. One site is near the closest Sprint store, and that's where I saw 12+ Mbps speeds a couple Saturdays ago.

 

EDIT: Checked out both sites. Got within a half-mile of both, with near-light-of-sight, to get 30+ CNR. Latency and speeds were comparable to the site nearest my apartment. On the way to the site closest to the Sprint store, there were plenty of pockets where I would lose WiMAX service completely, even while outdoors on the sidewalk.

 

I'm curious about whether the limiting factor for data speeds is the Clear Spot itself (it's not my computer; I can hit 50+ Mbps over WiFi and 100+ Mbps connected via Ethernet). I've never sen sustained speeds above about 8 Mbps when connected to the device, though peaks have hit higher. Maybe the hardware in there just isn't that strong? Can anyone else disprove me by hitting 12 Mbps on a speed test with their Clear Spot?

[MacinJosh]

Just took a look at Clear's coverage map in my area. Wow...they have 29 sites in one screen worth of map in north Austin' date=' where a screen is defined by their parameters, zoomed out as far as I can before I lose the site locations. Several sites are less than a mile from another site. It's phenomenal how dense you have to get on 2500MHz to cover an area.

 

Once my laptop finishes charging, I'll have a look at two more sites in my area, both of which have wireless backhaul links installed. One site is near the closest Sprint store, and that's where I saw 12+ Mbps speeds a couple Saturdays ago.

 

EDIT: Checked out both sites. Got within a half-mile of both, with near-light-of-sight, to get 30+ CNR. Latency and speeds were comparable to the site nearest my apartment. On the way to the site closest to the Sprint store, there were plenty of pockets where I would lose WiMAX service completely, even while outdoors on the sidewalk.

 

I'm curious about whether the limiting factor for data speeds is the Clear Spot itself (it's not my computer; I can hit 50+ Mbps over WiFi and 100+ Mbps connected via Ethernet). I've never sen sustained speeds above about 8 Mbps when connected to the device, though peaks have hit higher. Maybe the hardware in there just isn't that strong? Can anyone else disprove me by hitting 12 Mbps on a speed test with their Clear Spot?[/quote']

 

The Clear Spot, like it's cousin, the iSpot had severe limitations in it's antenna. Frankly, I think it was a defect in manufacturing. I never got over 6 Mbps on the iSpot because it's account limited, and on my Sprint phone I never got better than 8 Mbps on my Evo Shift.

 

I really don't see that the Spot will reach 12 down.

 

Sent from my LG Viper 4G LTE using Forum Runner

[iansltx]

Interesting...and this is an issue with the Voyager as well?

 

For what it's worth, I've gotten close enough to the tower that antennas should not be an issue at all...we're talking about around 30 dB CNR here. If there's a limitation with the Spot that's keeping me from high speeds, it would be the CPU, USB port or 802.11 radio, not the 802.16 antennas.

 

I'm half-tempted to go to Best Buy and exchange the Spot for a Stick, so that I can make sure I'm getting the absolute highest speeds the network will provide...but then again, does the current generation of Clear Stick get 12 Mbps speeds in good signal conditions, or is it too cheaply made?

 

EDIT: Looks like I'd have to exchange the Spot for a Hub in order to get better speeds; looks like the Stick Atlas is likewise limited in its performance.

[iansltx]

Went to Best Buy a little while ago and swapped the Clear Spot Voyager for a Clear Hub Express. Not nearly as mobile as the Spot, but I want speed more than mobility, and that's what I'm getting

 

I have tested the service on the same three towers as before, but this time I was able to hit speeds of 10+ Mbps on all towers, with the record being 17.5 Mbps on a site that mostly serves TX-360. This was with an extremely hot RSSI (-50 or less) and a SNR of over 35.

 

Heading to Kerrville now to see what things are like down there.

 

My difference in experience between the Clear Spot and the Clear Hub just reinforces my opinion that 2500MHz should be used primarily in a fixed/nomadic context, where you can pump up the subscriber antenna gain to a higher level because your device can be bigger and suck more power. Capacity augmentation (i.e. hot zones) work on 2500 too, but performance is lackluster at any sort of distance.

[WiWavelength]

Can you talk further about the field test parameters included in these Clear devices, maybe post some pics? I might be interested in picking one up just for WiMAX testing purposes, since I have effectively retired my WiMAX handset.

 

AJ

[iansltx]

Sure, though I'll have to go from memory on the Clear Spot (and no pics, unfortunately) since i swapped it out this morning.

 

Unfortunately the desktop modem (Clear Hub Express) has very little in the way of field test capabilities. You get RSSI, CNR, the BSID you're connecting to and the frequency (in KHz...channels always seem to be at xxxx.5 MHz) it's connecting at.

 

The Clear Spot has a much heavier-duty field test screen, but you lose a lot of performance on the RF side and, I guess, the CPU side, seeing as how I couldn't push more than 7.2 Mbps through the device without issue. But in addition to the stats on the Hub, you get a more descriptive connection state readout (e.g. Connecting (3Way Handshake), CNR and RSSI numbers for both internal antennas, current and average Tx power and maybe one or two other overall stats (the site's PN, maybe? I forget).

 

Below those listings is a table with "Neighbors" of the site. The BSID, bandwidth, CNR and RSSI are all listed. I think the frequencies are also listed, but I'm not 100% sure. I think there's a PN value per site here too. In most cases the CNR is -16 and the RSSI is effectively zeroed out, since the device is tuned to the frequency of the site it's connected to, not that of another site.

 

If you've got additional questions about the Spot, I may or may not be able to answer them. I can plug in the Hub and answer questions on that front, though I'm 20+ miles from WiMAX here.

[iansltx]

Mental note: don't forget your laptop charger. LogMeIn isn't nearly as convenient as a not-dead MacBook sitting in front of you

 

Anyway, I tested out Clear's service in Kerrville at two locations, plus a meandering course in between. At 1101 Sidney Baker (a Dairy Queen) I hit -65 RSSI and a CNR in the high twenties. This climbed to the -50s and mid-thirties, respectively, when I retested at 901 Wheless Ave (corner of Wheless and Washington). In both cases, the tower's backhaul was the limiting factor, not my signal.

 

Speaking of towers, my best guess is that a water tower about 4500 feet southeast of the Wheless location (pretty much in line with the direction of the road at that point...gotta love line of sight) is where Clear has their gear. I think a paging company has some equipment on the tower as well, as do a few government entities and, until recently, a WISP trial of a local telephone cooperative.

 

As far as the backhaul side of things goes, if I didn't know better I'd say the Clear site was being backhauled via a 10M down, 1.5M up Time Warner Cable Business Class connection...over coax! I should've tried connecting to 192.168.100.1 via my modem just to make sure, but they would've tunneled through anything like that, right? More realistically, I'll bet they've got a 10M Ethernet over Copper circuit from Windstream feeding the site, for a total monthly cost somewhere south of $1000.

 

As you might imagine, speeds were highly variable, ranging from less than a megabit down and up to nearly 10 Mbps down and around 1 Mbps up. Latency was around 100-120ms...disregard the reading in this speedtest photo; I don't know what was going on there. Maybe a sudden spike in usage by Sprint WiMAX users "in the know"

 

 

Apparently Kerrville is in a different region than Austin (rtx...not sure what that stands for...instead of hou...maybe "rural Texas"?), because I pulled a completely different IP (50.11.148.119 vs. 71.xxx.xxx.xxx in Austin). Routing was also quite different; I was in Dallas just a couple hops after my modem, with some level of peering going on (to Google and Softlayer, for example) in addition to connectivity via Level3. Latency was actually worse than in Austin despite the more direct path to Dallas, but for a market that barely even exists (one protection site tower), I can't complain! Certainly wouldn't buy Clearwire service for use only in Kerrville though...the connection is far too variable to be worth $50 per month.

 

By the way, here are a few traceroutes that I took from the two locations (since both had good signals, it doesn't matter which...and I don't remember which anyway):

 

1 [AS8151] clearmodem (192.168.15.1) 2.060 ms 4.807 ms 3.114 ms

2 * * *

3 [AS65534] 10.41.233.165 (10.41.233.165) 182.998 ms 111.300 ms 145.183 ms

4 [AS16586] 71.22.6.205 (71.22.6.205) 123.153 ms 178.890 ms 177.733 ms

5 [AS3356] xe-9-2-0.edge9.dallas1.level3.net (4.59.118.21) 181.291 ms 107.429 ms 179.865 ms

6 [AS3356] ae-2-70.edge3.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.145.72) 315.331 ms

å [AS3356] ae-1-60.edge3.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.145.8) 192.928 ms

[AS3356] ae-4-90.edge3.dallas1.level3.net (4.69.145.200) 273.569 ms

7 [AS3356] d.resolvers.level3.net (4.2.2.4) 139.143 ms 121.537 ms 130.066 ms

 

traceroute to hawkhost.com (208.43.49.44), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 [AS8151] clearmodem (192.168.15.1) 2.045 ms 1.868 ms 1.421 ms

2 * * *

3 [AS65534] 10.41.233.165 (10.41.233.165) 120.044 ms 99.783 ms 180.064 ms

4 [AS16586] 71.22.6.205 (71.22.6.205) 327.225 ms 179.341 ms 175.151 ms

5 [AS0] te1-5.bbr01.eq01.dal01.networklayer.com (206.223.118.24) 194.744 ms 121.145 ms 180.454 ms

6 [AS36351] ae0.dar01.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.211) 194.481 ms

[AS36351] ae0.dar02.sr01.dal01.networklayer.com (173.192.18.253) 94.447 ms 178.792 ms

7 [AS36351] po1.fcr04.sr05.dal01.networklayer.com (66.228.118.214) 125.305 ms 133.381 ms

[AS36351] po2.fcr04.sr05.dal01.networklayer.com (66.228.118.218) 169.869 ms

8 [AS36351] hawkhost.com (208.43.49.44) 103.506 ms 158.866 ms 124.973 ms

 

traceroute to google.com (74.125.227.142), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets

1 [AS8151] clearmodem (192.168.15.1) 2.701 ms 1.622 ms 1.723 ms

2 * * *

3 [AS65534] 10.41.233.165 (10.41.233.165) 104.305 ms 96.642 ms 202.212 ms

4 [AS16586] 71.22.6.205 (71.22.6.205) 112.306 ms 113.720 ms 117.139 ms

5 [AS16586] 71.22.6.130 (71.22.6.130) 192.270 ms 109.067 ms 81.012 ms

6 [AS15169] 72.14.217.204 (72.14.217.204) 112.341 ms 111.849 ms 109.820 ms

7 [AS15169] 72.14.233.67 (72.14.233.67) 185.059 ms 182.437 ms 110.236 ms

8 [AS15169] 216.239.43.187 (216.239.43.187) 199.987 ms 109.281 ms 179.015 ms

9 [AS15169] dfw06s17-in-f14.1e100.net (74.125.227.142) 214.306 ms 108.706 ms 109.829 ms

 

Thus ends my investigation into Clear WiMAX for now...unless someone wants to buy me a day pass to check out connectivity in San Antonio

[MacinJosh]

Inverters in your car work great for testing devices like the Clear hub express when traveling. You can pick one up from your local truck stop.

 

Sent from my LG Viper 4G LTE using Forum Runner

[digiblur]

Inverters in your car work great for testing devices like the Clear hub express when traveling. You can pick one up from your local truck stop.

 

Sent from my LG Viper 4G LTE using Forum Runner

 

Sometimes that just seems so silly. You go from 12vdc to 120vac then plug in your wall wart for the device and go to 5vdc. Easy to do but when you stop and think about it, it's just a huge waste.

 

Sent from my C64 w/Epyx FastLoad cartridge

[iansltx]

I was using a cheapie Wal-Mart inverter to do all the testing, actually. It comes with a 120VAC outlet and a USB port...excellent since I have so many USB-chargeable devices.

 

Ousted the inverter while fully realizing that I was converting 12VDC to 120VAC...back to 12VDC...in the case of the Clear Hub. The adapter is more meaty than most I see today for consumer grade routers...2A instead of 500 mA or even 1A, but if I had the correct cable I could have saved the double conversion.

[MacinJosh]

 

Sometimes that just seems so silly. You go from 12vdc to 120vac then plug in your wall wart for the device and go to 5vdc. Easy to do but when you stop and think about it' date=' it's just a huge waste.

 

Sent from my C64 w/Epyx FastLoad cartridge[/quote']

 

If i had the ability to plug my Mac directly into my car plug, that would make things so much easier.

 

Sent from my LG Viper 4G LTE using Forum Runner