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ACUPAT National Guard Backpack

and Finally

Be Your Own Hotspot

Turn a backpack into a portable, solar-powered Wi-Fi hotspot, and share a high-speed connection anywhere

By Mike Outmesguine Posted 06.23.2005

by Mike Outmesguine: Mike Outmesguine

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I love the fact that more and more devices are sporting built-in Wi-Fi—the Sony PSP, smartphones, even Kodak’s EasyShare-One digital camera. The lone hitch: Wi-Fi is useless without a hotspot. Sure, thousands of spots are available, but few are free, and coverage is far from ubiquitous. What if you could marry the short-range power of Wi-Fi with the huge coverage areas of high-speed cellular services such as EV-DO to create a portable hotspot? You could use any Wi-Fi-enabled gadget anywhere you’ve got a cell signal. Play multiplayer games with friends in the park, or blog an event in real-time. Since
EV-DO works at freeway speeds, you could even give Internet access to an entire road-trip caravan.

Those are exactly the kinds of things you can do with the backpack below. Its secret ingredient: the Junxion Box. Plug a cellular-network card into the book-size open-source-based device, and voil—instant Wi-Fi hotspot, with speeds averaging around 700 kilobits per second. To power the box, I wired it to a 1.2-amp-hour battery and dropped both into the Voltaic Systems backpack, which has a built-in solar charger. Now I can surf for as long as three hours without being tethered to anything but a cell signal. The project isn’t cheap, but prices for the components and service are sure to come down in the next year or so. In the meantime, you can find me in the hills around Southern California. I’ll be the one surrounded by PSP-packing hikers.

See more photos of the backpack here.

Parts List
†Junxion Box wireless gateway $700; junxionbox.com
†Verizon Wireless EV-DO PCMCIA card $100; verizonwireless.com
†Voltaic Systems solar-charging backpack $230; voltaicsystems.com

These parts are available at any electronics store:
†12-volt battery with spade terminals, 1.2 or higher amp-hour $15
†Male DC power plug, size M $5
†18-gauge wire, black and red $5
†Female insulated quick-disconnect connectors, crimp-type, sized for battery spade terminals $3
†In-line fuse holder $7
†20-amp fuse 50 cents