This page lists the hardware that will be used in the demo.
Seventeen laptop computers will be used in the "outside" part of the demo.
8 Toshiba Tecras (Model 500c, 133 MHz Pentium)
Three laptops will be at fixed locations and will generate the satellite error corrections for differential GPS. These three laptops will not be part of the wireless network (since in a real military environment, they would be unnecessary and would not exist), but will continually broadcast the error corrections to all laptops in range.
The other fourteen laptops will be assigned to soldiers and will continually move as the soldiers move. These laptops will receive the satellite error corrections and use them to correct the soldier's measured geographic location. The three error-correction laptops will be placed such that each soldier will always be in range of one of the error-correction laptops, even if that soldier is out of range of all other soldiers.
One of the error-correction laptops will also serve as the gateway between the wired and wireless network. In all likelihood, this laptop will be placed in a window of a Dartmouth building (with the GPS and wireless-network antennas just outside the window).
Each laptop will be running Slackware Linux.
More specifically the laptops will be allocated as follows:
| Number of laptops | Purpose |
| 1 | (1) Gateway between wired and wireless network and (2) generator of GPS error corrections |
| 2 | Generator of GPS error corrections |
| 1 | Platoon leader |
| 8 | Big group of soldiers, which might split into subgroups of 4 and 4 (as the soldiers change positions to restore network connectivity to the small group) |
| 4 | Small group of soldiers, which will break away from the main group to demonstrate what happens when there is a network disconnection |
| 1 | Broken. It seems reasonable to assume that an average of one laptop will be broken each time we run the demo. If all laptops are functional, we will add a soldier to the small group. |
Each laptop will have an 802.11 Wavelan II card from Lucent (2.0 Mb/s with a range up to 2000 feet) and a Wavelan II "Range Extender" antenna.
Each laptop will have a Motorola Oncore GPS unit with antenna. The three error-correction laptops will have Oncore VP units, which can generate error error corrections for each satellite signal. The other laptops will have (cheaper) Oncore GT+ units, which can not generate error corrections, but can use the VT error corrections to correct the measured position.
If time allows, we will port some modest subset of the soldier's GUI to Windows CE devices. These devices will communicate with Metricom Radio Modems. One or more of the soldier's laptops will have a Metricom Radio Modem in addition to the Wavelan II card, and will serve as a moving gateway between the Metricom network and the Wavelan network.
The reason for the CE devices is that they are much smaller than the laptops, and thus they will make the demo more realistic (i.e., a real soldier in the field might not want to carry a full-sized laptop, even a military-hardened one).
The demo involves queries against several databases. Replicated copies of these databases will be installed on several "wired" workstations at Dartmouth, Harvard, RPI and Illinois, and on several laptops that we bring to Washington for the live portion of the demo.