Over the summer I want to make a tiny device (ideal for hooking to a key chain) that can communicate with my PC from a far distance. I'd most likely have a small LCD screen that would display your current download speed, percent of completion, CPU temp, and the possibility of booting and shutdown. The only problem is I don't know how to send and recieve this signal. If it was somewhere close or outside my house I could just use a wireless access point, but for being an hour or so away at a store or at school it would not work at all. The only thing I can't think of is trying to manipulate a cell phone signal because you can get a signal litterally anywhere in a suburbia. Any ideas? I can work out the programming and chip construction over the summer but first I need to know if I can actually get a signal to my computer.

Depends on what you use in the computer. Wi-Fi devices are a different kettle of fish than cell phones when to comes to communicating over a distance. The transmitting power of a cell phone base station is considerably higher than that of a wi-fi device. Cell phones have almost universal coverage in populated areas. You will never get that with wi-fi without some considerable change to the regulations governing their use. Wireless Access Points have their power reduced deliberately. If you exceed that power you could find yourself falling foul of your local regulatory authorities. You are going to need a way of connecting a cell phone to your computer and that could prove and expensive proposition. Stuart

Thanks for the reply, I guess the only way this is plausible is to manipulate a cell phone. According to "about.com"; "Almost all digital cell phones can be used as if they were a modem." An easy way out would be to ping a website that updates my computer status through the server but that wouldn't be very convenient.

Unless you have free cellular use it could get to be very expensive. You can use a dialup land line at the computer end and a version of remote access for your connection to the cellphone.