September 11th, economic conditions and other factors resulted in an attendance at the Consumers Electronic Show 2002 of about 2/3rd of last year. From a selfish point of view, it was nice because I was able to get to all the vendors of interest in about 4 hours and it took two days last year. Unfortunately for Rvers, the wrong kind of wireless everything was one of the main themes of this years show. Any person who lives and works in a large city or town, where digital cell phone and wireless internet wide area networks are in place will have a plethora of new toys to choose from that will enhance their work day. The Palm Devices with new Microsoft operating systems could be found integrated into pagers, cell phones and GPS navigation systems along with integrated wireless wide area network access for email and limited Internet information. The problem is that the population of something like 80% of the potential users live and work on less than 20% of the land mass. So these systems work well in large cities and towns and along the Interstate Highways. Vehicle systems, also based on hardened PC or Palm platforms were everywhere. Alpine demonstrated a cell phone based, real time navigation system that will direct commuters around any slow traffic conditions on their way to work or guide a salesperson to his or her next appointment. They have real time traffic centers that communicate with the on board computer providing continuous routing information to guide uses around traffic and accidents. This neat city service does nothing for the Rvers or truckers who drive the highways. Magellan showed a Palm based Navigation system where you plug the Palm into a PC to get today's route, then you plug the Palm into a vehicle based device that looks like a battery charger, but in fact has a GPS antenna integrated into it. TravRoute as well demonstrated new Palm based solutions for vehicle navigation.

The other thing that was striking about CES was that everywhere you looked you saw a large flat screen LCD or Plasma display. Sharp showed a wall full of LCD's with a proprietary driver box, that broke a standard TV image up so that it looked like a screen that was at least 10 feet high and 14 feet wide. If you have a $40K budget you could have almost a theater size screen in your home media room. One thing for sure is that the price of these flat screens is coming down as the competition increases. By this time next year, I think a 54 inch Plasma Display will be down to about $2000 instead of their current $10,000. Many of these flat panels will find themselves in Motorhomes this year. It will be a lot safer to have a 10 lbs screen over the drivers head than the current 40 or 50 lb weight of a standard CRT television.

KVH displayed a truly complete mobile wireless Internet system. Using DirectPC as a base, this product uses a dedicated 12 to 18" dome tracking satellite antenna for download. A much smaller but separate dedicated uplink antenna that dynamically selects a cell phone channel or satellite channel. These two antennas are connected to a Custom Router (size of a desktop computer) and modem that uses standard Ethernet wired or wireless connection to a laptop computer. So if you have $7000 handy and want to put two more antennas on your roof you can have truly mobile Internet for $80 per month and $.79 per minute of use. Hughes, DirecTV and EchoStar showed their larger fixed satellite internet solutions and stressed that they could not be installed in a mobile environment. I think we will wait a long time for a reasonable wireless communication system that will work in off the main road places like Quartzite.

Sprint/Verizon and Nextel offer wireless cellular data solutions using special three mode cell phones or wireless cellular modems that fit the PCMCIA slot in Laptops that connect you to their cell based wireless wide area network. These systems provide speeds of 19.2K baud which is better than an analog cell phone connection but far slower than most land line modem connections at 56K baud. Other manufacturers demonstrated wireless local area networks that could allow camp ground owners to offer rental connections at 56k baud. I am aware of several other trials of high speed satellite internet systems, but none were shown at CES.

XM and Sirus, the two satellite radio broadcast companies that I talked about last year are on full roll outs of their systems. The necessary satellite receivers and antennas are being integrated into lots of vehicles as standard features. This commercial free, don't change the channel coast to coast service seems to be very popular with long haul truckers. The shortage of skilled truck drivers causes the freight companies to install lots of driver amenities in all their trucks. One contract for 2000 Sirus units was announced. Along with music both systems have talk and new programming, but as of this date you Rush Limbaugh fans will still have to scan the terrestrial broadcast spectrum to hear his pearls of wisdom. NPR, Bloomberg, Fox, C-span, CNN, ABC, CNBC, BBC and other news/talk channels will keep the listeners tuned in to major events, unless you drive through a tunnel. One has several Hispanic channels. The satellite receivers cost several hundred dollars and the subscription is around $10 per month for these services.

In summary, this year's products and services did not disappoint me, except for an absence of a good wireless internet solution for those of us who try to avoid driving through big cities at almost any cost or inconvenience.

Bob G.

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