[Soekris] Temperature Issues

[Vince Vielhaber]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, selfabuse at selfabuse.net wrote:

> Hello,
> I was hoping I could rack everybodys brain here for a moment. I have a
> net4521 that is currently acting as a wireless AP for the corporate park I
> work in. It's mounted in a NEMA enclosure out in the center of the park.
> I'm up in PA, and it's started to snow over the past week - Temperatures
> at night have been in the single digits (Farenheit). From about 5:30pm to
> about 9am all our wireless customers keep bouncing up and down. As best I
> can tell, it's because the temperature drops below the recommended
> operating temperature for the board. Does anyone have any experience with
> keeping these little guy heated? The whole setup right now is running off
> of a 12v deep cycle battery, so adding a heater isn't really an option. We
> were thinking of putting it in a smaller plastic enclosure inside the NEMA
> case and finding some kind of temperature monitor that would run on it,
> and kick on a little 12v dome light to heat up the plastic enclosure when
> the temperature hit about freezing. I just wanted to see if anyone else
> has run to similar issues so I don't duplicate efforts.

Have a number of them sitting atop towers in Northern Michigan.  Never had
a problem.  They're all in nema enclosures and are sandwiched between two
nice thick pieces of fiberglass insulation.  The first one we put about a
100 ohm 2 watt resistor in the enclosure across the 12 volts but it turned 
out unnecessary.

Vince.
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