Hacker News Reader

They do act as repeaters! The mesh networking design was one of the big selling points, it was going to be a city-wide teenage mesh network!

Unfortunately, one acting as a repeater would take your range from 10 feet to 20 feet.

View on HN

I more meant making a fake cybiko that would allow you to communicate with someone in another city with another repeater, connected over the internet.

You could configure a second Cybiko, hooked up to your computer, to act as a gateway between an untethered Cybiko and the internet. They teased a standalone device to do this (CyWIG) but I don't think that ever actually shipped.

At one point I did set this up and managed to browse some (terrible) WAP websites and I think I managed to get AIM working somehow too. No memory as to if you could tunnel through to do other wireless things with other bridged Cybikos though as the setup was so clowny I had no other friends to try it with.

They had the device for the Cybiko 2 but they were very hard to get in the US.

Very interesting! I did some searching but it seems they never had a system for having it act as a bridge between two cybiko nets? I would expect that to be a reasonable thing to do what with the mesh network.

On the Cybiko 2, there was a wifi card add on that allowed you to do this. Unfortunately.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com