Man that's cool. I've been trying to figure out a was to connect my business to my home. It's about a 5 miles throw, but unfortunately, not a line of sight. I've looked at some radios, but thay are really expensive, about $1k for the whole system.

__________________
You don't need a quadraphonic Blaupunkt -- you need a curve
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My brother is the head networking guy for a local computer tech center.
He said there are systems in remote areas using the wireless routers and high gain antennae systems with multiple remotely located repeaters that are solar or small windmill powered that have good reliable connection speeds at near 50 miles!

I dont know where but I can see it being possible in some remote locations.

The down side is when a router goes goofy and needs to be unplugged in order to be reset. A 100 mile drive just to do a few unplug and reset operations could get to be a bit anoying.

Personaly I would just use a simple timer that drops the power at each router/repeater station for about 20 seconds once or twice a day in order to get a fully automatic and regular reset cycle needed or not.

__________________
"Issue a general safety warning. Then look the other way and allow stupidity the chance to eliminate itself." -- tcmtech
"Those who can, Will. Those who can't, will achieve positions of power over those who can and then promptly stop them." -- tcmtech
"Your impossibility may just be my day to day routine." -- tcmtech

 

I found this interesting... 125 miles with unamplified wifi.

Wi-Fi Toys

 

Well thats very encouraging, it makes going a mile through unobstructed dry air with a budget for new equipment seem almost trivial.

 

I too am searching for a way to connect get wifi for our get-away cabin in New Mexico from an AP at the telco about 1 mile away. I thought I might chime in with some things I have learned and would do in your situation.

Seeing that you have pretty much line of sight and great conditions, I would go wireless with two 2.4 GHz grid parabolic dishes. The higher the dBi on the dish antenna the narrower the transmit/receive area will be. In your case, you know exactly where you are shooting so I would go with the highest affordable dish, 24 dBi. I have found them reasonably priced at Streakwave.com and l-com.com. The shipping is what gets you on most sites I have found, but those two are reasonable (Have streakwave.com orders shipped to a business or work address -- it is considerably cheaper than residential, some dishes weights are not entered correctly either so it will show $90 to $100 shipping. It should be $15 to $20 for two based on a model I got a shipping estimate on to my house). One dish will mount at the barn facing your house and one will mount at the house facing the barn. Another website you can find wifi stuff at is Fleeman, Anderson & Bird, Corp..

Most of the dishes I have found will mount on a 1 or 2 inch pole. A old DirectTV or Dish Network J mount that their dishes mount to appear to be 2 inches and that is what I will use to mount our parabolic dish on. In your situation, you will need two. You can probably pick a couple up off eBay for $20 or talk to someone who isn't using their dishes anymore. The key is little to no movement however you mount them.

You could use the old satellite dishes, but you have to nearly point them to the ground and measure out exactly where to mount the can on the feed horn. Given my tight tolerances and distance, I have chosen to go with a application-specific 2.4GHz premade dish. Also, the grid helps with less movement from the winds moving the dish versus a solid dish.

Like blueroomelectronics said, I would think you could use a gun scope on the end of the feed horn to get them reasonably aligned with each other.

You can then buy two Linksys WRT54GL. I usually buy them off Amazon.com. Right now they are $70 but they drop down to $50 often. Flash both routers with DD-WRT. It is very easy, don't be intimidated if you haven't ever done it. They have a guide that explains how to flash the router. You will probably get version 1.1 router. It tells you to just flash the standard on v1.1 routers, but the last one I received I had to flash the mini version and then the standard version to get it to work.

Depending on the version of the antenna you purchase, you will need a N-Type Male OR N-Type Female (Dish antenna side) to RP-TNC (WRT54GL antenna side connection) pigtail to connect the dish to the routers. I would suggest that you use LMR-400 coax for the pigtail and 50 ohm rated connectors. You can purchase them premade off eBay, l-com.com, fab-corp.com, etc. Be sure they are LMR-400 or higher and not RG6 or RG59. The cable and connectors needs to be rated 50 ohms, not 70 ohms. The antennas are rated at 50 ohms if you look at the specs. Wikipedia has a good primer over coaxial cable and the attenuation lose in dB per meter of the cable. Given your setup, I would think the barns needs to very short - meter or two and the house maybe 7 to 10 meters. Your internet connection will plug into the internet (WAN) port on the router in the barn. The WAN port on the router in the house will go unused. Don't plug a computer into it, it won't work.

DD-WRT will allow you to setup a Wireless Distribution Service in which you can link the two routers together. No need for a computer running at the barn and the house for the internet connection to work using up lots of electricity. Just these two low powered devices. You may put the router inside the barn in an enclosure, preferrably waterproof, weatherproof and out of the sun. I have read where some people have mounted a fan in the router or in the enclosure to keep it cool. Youtube has some videos. You would think you could even splice off the power adapter to the router to power a fan inside the enclosure? Maybe use a used drysheet as a fan dust collector? Here is a guide on how to setup the WDS on both routers. Basically this will be your receive and transmit equipment from the barn to the house.

tcmtech talked about equipment locking up and having to drive to reset it. DD-WRT has built-in keep alive functions that power cycle the router on sensed lost connection with the hosts/internet and at pre-determined intervals, i.e. every night at 2am.

Make sure you setup wireless security. Don't leave them open. At a minimum use WPA and never use WEP or open.

The routers feature a transmit power increase feature over stock power (28 mW) from anywhere between 1 mW to 251 mW. I would use this sparingly since increasing the transmit increases the heat on the internals and could prematurely shorten the life of the router. You can purchase one or two external amplifiers, such as this 1W 802.11g Signal Amplifier/Booster (Model: AR-1105) which I found on eBay. I would try the setup without it before you purchase something you don't need. I might note that it has different end connections than the WRT54GL (RP-TNC). It appears to need RP-SMA, but I would double check. Each connection or adapter you use in the line of connections from the router to the antenna will cause some dB lose.

Once both routers are up and communicating, you can use a program called iperf to test the actual throughput from router to router for dish tweeking.

You can connect to the router in the house via wireless or wired LAN in jacks in the back of the router.

As far as costs, you are looking at ~$100 for the two routers, ~$120-$130 shipped for the two dishes, and the cost of the pigtails. Still less than one months service. You may pick up one or two spare WRT54GLs if it works out. I don't know how much longer Linksys will continue to make the WRT54G(L) series of routers.

I haven't tested this particular setup but I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work.

Someone can correct me what I have wrong as I am researching this as well.

PM me or post back on this thread if you have any questions. I will try to remember to check back since I don't haunt this website. :-)

 

My system has the same basic stuff you mentioned and it never does the auto reset function. Hence the occasional drive over to the windmill tower to reset the two units.

We also have the outputs set for maximum power and all four units have been in service for over a year continuous. As for the boxes I simply took apart the routers and mounted the circuit boards in a 6 x 6 x 4 commercial plastic electrical box I bought at Menard's for about $20. All thats sticking out is the antennae connectors and the power cord and they come out the bottom so rain cant collect on them.
The box cover is gasket-ed and the antennae connections are silicon ed so its weather tight and has never had any heat issues so far. The internal box volume is more than enough for passive cooling to work even with 105 degree F heat and in direct sunlight. I have had nor over cooling problems even at - 40 F either.

I didn't know about the not needing a server computer in order to make the land to wireless link.

__________________
"Issue a general safety warning. Then look the other way and allow stupidity the chance to eliminate itself." -- tcmtech
"Those who can, Will. Those who can't, will achieve positions of power over those who can and then promptly stop them." -- tcmtech
"Your impossibility may just be my day to day routine." -- tcmtech

 

I hooked up my neighbor to my wifi router one fall... he was too cheap to get high speed, and bellsuck's switch was full. I used the easy antenna plans from this site

www.freeantennas.com

You could download a pattern to print out so the reflector was the correct distance and shape. Glue some tinfoil on a piece of cardboard and viola! I put a small linksys bridge in his window on the top floor and put a reflector on that as well. Worked pretty good until spring when the leaves came back. It was an interesting learning experience but prone to dropped packets (rain,snow,fading etc) and constant recycling of the router (i've since flashed the router with DD and it is fantastic!) and then I got bored and told him to get high speed.

BTW.. the distance was about 500 meters on a 80mw bridge. There are other more powerful cards I could've used... at the time they went to 240mw.

So short story long... for something to be used in extreme conditions like TCM a nice weatherproof box but for what i had, two windows with half-way decent line of sight, parabolic reflectors are all you need.

 

Don't we all?

 

Yes, I may actually be able to do this without any bought materials, I know I have some spare wireless routers, and in the barn he has two of those dishes, wood, sheet metal and such. I'll just do my research before next time I go down there. I've setup plenty of wireless networks where there was no server, just a switch. But this might be a little different. It would go

Modem->Wireless router -> Dish -> Dish ->wireless router(and possibly a switch)->Cat5 cables -> computers.

I havent done that before, but i think if i give the wireless routers static IP adresses it should work fine. I'll have to read up on wireless some more to figure out all the pitfalls. I know you need a static IP to connect a switch to another switch, but I've never done that with a wireless connection in the middle.

 

Pretty cool! - I might have a play at work tomorrow

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Your wireless routers have to support their versions of WDS, bridging, repeatig, whatever to communicate. If they do, it would be best of they were both the same model for compatibility. Some configurations will drop the speed in half. Since it appears you are going all wired inside, speed won't matter because your internet speed won't exceed your wireless speed.

Your best bet is to look at the routers to see which ones support the same third-party firmware, such as DD-WRT. DD-WRT has a compatibility search here.

To hook up the switch to your router, just use a crossover cable from the router LAN port to one of the switch's ports. It doesn't have to be a managed switch -- a dummy switch will work just fine. Some newer switches support auto-mdix in which is senses it's a switch and crosses internally for you -- a straight through patch cable will work just fine -- no crossover needed.

If you are going the sat dish route, engadget has a good write up here to make a biquad dish antenna. Your measurements when you are making the antenna have to be near exact to get in the 2.4 GHz range and for reliability. Search youtube for AmateurLogic.TV and you will find some good videos by them on making your own antennas (episode 3 and 4 are probably what you are looking for). Those two episodes explain a lot of the principles. Also youtube has some good videos on making the dish antenna.

You can get some connectors from DealExtreme. I don't know the quality or the ohms rating, but for cheap crap it is a good site. It takes about 2-3 weeks to get it from China.

Whatever you decide to do, you might post back some pictures and info of your experiences. I am interested to see how it turns out and may help others down the line with similar situations. Best of luck.

 

Not sure what third-party firmware you are running, but if it has cron jobs available -- set it to reboot once or twice a day during off peak hours, if it allows it. Or move to DD-WRT if you aren't running it I used to run Sveasoft back in the day but moved to DD-WRT and haven't looked back. A lot of people run Tomato too.

Glad to hear that heat/cold isn't an issue with you. I haven't ever stuck a wireless router out in the elements. It has always been in a climate controlled environment.

*I have another post for Triode once it makes it past moderation

 

All of the reading and research my brother and I did said the same thing about heat and cold. My electronics experience said other wise.

We proved it works! No point in nit picking the what if's and maybes until they actually become Oh No's!
So far this last year I have done speed tests between our two places in blinding snow storms, 2 inch an hour down pours and dense fog. Never dropped below 50 meg a second computer to computer! Local internet provider drops outs and lockups are far more common though.

Plus if you know where to stand on our property you can have full high speed wireless Internet access with a laptop while standing out in the middle of a pasture thats down in a valley that hardly gets workable cell phone service!

__________________
"Issue a general safety warning. Then look the other way and allow stupidity the chance to eliminate itself." -- tcmtech
"Those who can, Will. Those who can't, will achieve positions of power over those who can and then promptly stop them." -- tcmtech
"Your impossibility may just be my day to day routine." -- tcmtech

 

I have no experience in electronics building, but have always had an interest since I was a kid. I am glad google lead me to this site. I look forward to looking through everything and learning.

 

Welcome to the what ever we are! This is a very informative site. I like it!
Maybe you could give use a short hello in the chat area! Now that you have your 3 post minimum out of the way!

__________________
"Issue a general safety warning. Then look the other way and allow stupidity the chance to eliminate itself." -- tcmtech
"Those who can, Will. Those who can't, will achieve positions of power over those who can and then promptly stop them." -- tcmtech
"Your impossibility may just be my day to day routine." -- tcmtech