What is the basestation used for?
The basestation connects to your development machine (a PC) and allows you to write programs that can run on your PC and use the basestation’s radio to communicate with remote Sun SPOTs. The development tools also make use of the basestation to deploy and debug applications on remote Sun SPOTs. Note that a full Sun SPOT can also be used as a basestation, though in doing so its sensor board would not be used.