CDMA-iDEN COW

So thats a Sprint hybrid COW? Pretty cool!

That's what I thought when I 1st saw it, the only thing that say's Sprint on it is the generator, otherwise nothing so it must be a brand new unit.

Pretty cool. Also, that thing is HUGE! I will be at the belmont stakes this coming saturday. Ever year since i've been going, I have not seen any cows on premises. The local towers must take a HUGE hit that day.

On Sunday they have between 130 & 140,000 fans in the seats plus the crews and people involved behind the scene's. So yeah they can take a pretty decent hit, especially with SprintNextel being the sponsor and AT&T and Alltel sponsoring cars, there are a lot of these users.

Also SprintNextel has the FAN View, which is a handheld device with headphones & you can see the race on the screen as well as stat's while the race is going on. I noticed a lot of people using it this year & at $50.00 per race or $70.00 for the weekend (3 races) they do alright with these units, but it takes spectrum.

These units run on CDMA? I thought they ran on some sort of 2.4 Ghz thing seperate from the CDMA network

I believe your correct, but they still need some type of antenna system to transmit it & I am not sure how it's done. They did have antenna's on top of the booths where the spotters stand & they may be for this setup.

http://www.engadget.com/2006/02/09/nascar-nextel-fanview-gives-you-live-video-on-race-day/

Yeah, these things run on 2.5 GHz. I wonder how well they work

There were some people in front of me using them & it looked like it worked really well & kept right up with the race.
I don't obviously know what the reporting was, but what they were listening to seemed to go along with what was happening at different points in the race.

For the person that goes to a lot of races you can buy these units from SprintNextel as well.

I wouldn't mind trying it to see how it works, maybe next year I will rent one.