I didn't know much about wireless networking equipment but it was obvious that one could plug wireless network interface adapters into off-the-shelf PCs and so I reasoned it should be possible to build a network that way. Linux seemed like a good OS choice and so I bought some PCI IEEE802.11b NICs and rescued a couple of outdated PCs from the office junk pile.
It turned out there were some snags with this approach. First, at that time there was no way to make a Linux PC with a wireless interface card behave as an access point. Only client (station) mode and 'ad-hoc' were supported. I tried to use ad-hoc, but it transpired that it didn't really work at all (and possibly still doesn't).
The other problem was power consumption. I needed to build a relay in a location that had no utility power, which meant solar panels as the power source. Regular PCs consume way too much power to run from any reasonably sized solar panel array.
For a while I toyed with the notion of some kind of ARM-based computer with lower power dissipation, for example a PDA.
However around this time low cost and low power wireless access points appeared on the market so I decided to base my network on them.
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