Long Range WiFi Hardware?

[TheExcession]

Currently looking into sharing my broadband connection with the old man. Trouble is he's about 4 miles away and round a hill.

So, we're looking at repeating reasonably long range wireless LAN.

Chatting to the 'lads' and the Linksys WRT54GS seems to be the dogs danglies, it runs a Linux OS Firmware which I hear can be modified to up the power a little.

Besides that there is also the choice of antenna. We've agreed an instalation with a neighbour that will give us line of site, and so they'll get to use the broadband access too.

So, question to the PH massive, anyone got any pointers for high gain directional and omni directional antennas? And, anyone got experience of using these access points? Or done something similar?

Needless to say, with 'cheaper is better' being my middle name we are looking for the least outlay possible, however I do want something reliable.

Over to you lot...

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

ThatPhilBrettGuy said:

TheExcession said: Currently looking into sharing my broadband connection with the old man. Trouble is he's about 4 miles away and round a hill. 2.4GHz does not go through hills. No ground wave at that frequency either. Sorry.

Hence the cooperative neighbour that will give us line of sight.

I've seen reports of wireless LAN going tens of km so a few miles shouldn't be an issue.

Just wondered if anyone had done it and what kit they are using.

best
Ex

btw, don't you lot have jobs to go to? Why are you up so late....

[TheExcession]

See? You guy's are all doom and gloom....

some antenna guy said:

Apparently, antennas of comparable gain cost upwards of $150. Over a clear line of sight, with short antenna cable runs, a 12db to 12db can-to-can shot should be able to carry an 11Mbps link well over ten miles.

www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

malman said:

I'm sure you could COOK something up from here <a href="http://www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/">www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/</a>

Ahhh, yes, seen this page before, great stuff but relies on a USB antenna, where unfortunatley our cable run won't support USB. Seen some good antennas built on those little wire frame wok type thingies, very similar.

malman said:

this one looks pretty good if you want omni directional <a href="http://wireless.gumph.org/articles/homemadeomni.html">http://wireless.gumph.org/articles/homemadeomni.html</a>

Just get page forbidden for this link

best
Ex
EFART

>> Edited by TheExcession on Monday 4th April 01:19

[TheExcession]

bogie said:

technically with retail 2.4Ghz kit you can get out to 24 miles. Ive installed/troubleshooted links up to 10 miles on normal consumer kit. All kit sold here outputs around 20dBM (the limit), then stick say an 18dBi directional antenna on it. The problem you will have is getting your antennas high enough to get good line of sight - do a search on 'fresnel zone' and get a calculator to work out just how much clearance you will need for a 4 mile link - from memory you may need a 15m diameter cone around your Line of sight to stand a chance.........

Good news, thanks!

I was looking at Fresnel Zones earlier and they might cause a bit of a problem, but I guess a few field tests swill sort that. Stil trying to get hold of some detailed maps of the area so we can plot this kind of stuff.

Would you mind indicating what hardware (AP and Antenna) you used to get your links working?

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

roop said:

www.solwise.co.uk|www.solwise.co.uk

Cheers Roop, great site, prices look very reaonable too. Will definately be giving these guys a call.

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

THanks for all the info guys, good topic.

I'm over in the Republic of Ireland so the UK laws are deifferent, however I think the 20dB limit is standard across Europe - I have the regulation docs here now so need to double check).

Anyway a few more questions....

I'm thinking about deploying wireless into the local village and then connect in a Sat link to give broadband access to the locals. We aren't due to get ADSL round here till 2006, and even then I've been assured by the local telecom engineers that the last mile copper is in such a poor state that they won't be able to deliver it very far out from the exchange anyway.

Leaving all the regs and licensing issues aside for the minute. I have a few other questions.


So consdier no line of site between 1 & 3 - imagine a dog leg round a hill at site 2

Site1-------------Site2-----------------Site3

1 to 2 is about 1 mile, 2 to 3 is about 1.5 miles.

Am I right in thinking that if you want to hop round this corner then you lose 50% of the bandwidth over the hop at site two?

And then to provide a hot spot at each site would we need an additional access point - ie one doing the 'backbone' and then one serving the hotspot?

And finally, can anyone give me any background on running a meshed network, something like....

Site1--Site2--Site3
|........|........./.|
|........|......../..|
|........|......./...|
|..Hill..|....../....|
|........|...../.....|
|.....Site 4./......|
|.../.....|..........|
|../......|..........|
|./.......|...Hill...|
|/........|..........|
Site5--Site6--Site7

Can you run OSPF over Wireless?

Are there any APs that will repeat a backbone and also act as an access point supports local client access?

cheers
Ex

(Edited to tidy up the diagram)

>> Edited by TheExcession on Tuesday 5th April 10:16

[TheExcession]

LexSport said:

I looked into this quite seriously when I was living up in Scotland. Take a look at the Meshbox AP - it's designed to extend the coverage of the network by meshing and sorts out the routing so that data can hop over the network to the backhaul link.

Thanks, looks good!

LexSport said:

Satellite is okay for backhaul but has latency problems. Not too bad a problem if most of the people using it are just web browsing as a decent transparent proxy can help with that.

Yup, I'm familliar with all those issues, good proxy/cacheing servers as well as local DNS etc all help. I'm on a satellite link here now.

LexSport said:

I also found that it was "interesting" trying to get one of the satellite providers to allow reselling of the bandwidth. From memory I found a Dutch company that would but can't remember the name off the top of my head.

Could be Aramiska, my current provider, they are selling comunity based solutions. There's always the sly option of tunnelling all the traffic through the satellite link to another server, that way the sat company can't see what you're doing, you didn't hear this from me

LexSport said:

It might well be worthwhile looking into the cost of leased line as if you're splitting the cost it might not be too horrendous. The other thing some communities have done (non-commercially) is made use of a Library's or School's leased line outside of opening hours as at least in the UK they're all supposed to have Internet access now. Not sure if this is the same over your way. As for losing bandwidth when you have a repeater - this is true if you use just the one transmitter. You'd have to have a pretty high network usage for this to become a practical problem though. Again there are ways around this - especially if you go for a PC based architecture for your APs as you can have more than one wireless card in each and have them running on different channels. In a really heavily used system you could potentially have one with an omni antenna for local access as an AP but another 1 or more cards on different channels (choose carefully so they don't overlap) for the inter AP communication or use semi-directional antenna. I believe Solwise do 120* antenna so you could have three giving you all round visibility...

Regarding using two APs on different channels, one for the back-bone and then one for the local hotspot, do you know if it is possible to run both APs through the same antenna? I've seen antenna splitters but wasn't certain if this is their purpose.

That would cut the cost a bit. I like the idea of us running all the client access on one channel and the backbone links on another.

LexSport said:

There are lots of possibilities.

Aint that the truth!

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

TheExcession said:

roop said: www.solwise.co.uk|www.solwise.co.uk Cheers Roop, great site, prices look very reaonable too. Will definately be giving these guys a call. best Ex

Having just spent the last four days pouring over maps, driving round looking at lines of sight and phoning Solwise 2 or 3 times a day I finally placed the first order for some equipment.

I have to say that the people at Solwise are without a doubt some of the best people I have ever had the pleasure of dealing with. I cannot recommend them highly enough in terms of helpfulness and technical knowledge.

Better still once they realised I was working on a community project they offered me all the equipment at trade prices!

Awesome! - here's to spending the next few weeks lobbing up antennas and access points!

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

Just thought I'd let you guy's know that we've started deploying a wirelss network around the place.

So far we have three base stations running Linksys WRT54GS access points, these are linked together using 15dB omni ariels. And we have two people getting broadband internet access through this system.

Later this week we'll deploy another 3 access points by which time we'll have the local village covered.

More interestingly, we took a drive out with the laptop into an adjacent village about 4 to 5 km away and were utterly astounded to be able to pick up and use the signal there.

There's something a bit freaky about sitting in the middle of no where and being able to browse the net

Hopefully I'll get a bit more information put together for anyone who's interested soon. I'll spec out the kit I'm deploying and show some maps and photo's.

All good stuff and a few excited people and happy customers already.

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

philthy said:

4 miles shouldn't be too much of a problem, providing you've got line of sight. If you want to fiddle around with some old/cheaper kit have a look at This site. One of the links from it,This one is very interesting. Also, to get as much gain as possible, consider using power over ethernet left clicky to keep your coaxial cable as short as possible. Here is one of the suppliers I've used, Here is another, and another Have fun. Phil

Hi Phil, thanks for the links, I'd seen bits of them before.

You might want to consider www.solwise.co.uk if you are buying up more kit, they're a good bit cheaper than in the links above.

We're using LinkSys WRT54GS AP with SVEASOFT Alchemy firmware. We might consider moving onto the newer Talisman firmware which fully sypports meshing depending on two things;

1. We'll let other users sort out the bugs first
2. We'll see how our network architecture expands, at the moment it's a long backbone but if we pickup a few people on the other side of the valley then we'll definately look int oa mesh.

Thanks to all of you for the +ve feedback and encouragement!

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

Here you go, just took a few snaps...

These are the boxes I'm housing the WRT54GS access points into. There's enough room to stick the PSU into the box too. The three gland nuts on the bottom are
1 - Antenna cable
2 - Mains Power to the PSU
3 - Optional Ethernet cable for hardwiring a client

These are faily quick to assemble, it only takes about an hour to put the whole lot together. Including preparing and crimping the connectors onto the antenna cable, doing the mains power and drilling for the mounts onto the antenna column.



Here you see a view of one of the APs with a 15 dB omni antenna. (It's bolted to the shed at about 11pm on the satellite dish in case you can't see it)



Close up of the antenna and WRT in its box. The mount is bolted to the wall using rawl plug expanding bolts and seems pretty secure. I was a little worried about carrying the weight of the aluminum pole and antenna on one mount. If it looks like it's coming loose we can drop the pole a bit and put in another wall mount.

The cable up to the antenna is low loss and only a couple of metres long. The APs are adjustable for power with the alchemy firmware. We're pretty sure that with such high gain antennas and such short cables we'll actually need to turn the power down.



This pic is taken from directly under the installation above looking back towards the house. Mounted on the wall to the right of the sat dish you can see a white rectangular 16dB flat panel. This is linking all the satellite hardware to the shed installation (At some stage I'll cable the shed and gain an extra Access Point).

In the distance above and very slightly left of the sat dish you can make out a yellow house, behind that you can see a ridge line covered in trees (not the horizon). This is the village where we tested the link from. We had an 18dB flat panel on about 2metres of cable dangled out of the car window.


So all good stuff.

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

Here's a pic of the network, at the moment I have everthing do upto Eileens. I went up to my Dad's place tonight and was able to just detect her Access Point, though the signal strength was not quite strong enough to post a thread here

Looks like we'll need the AP at Ryans before I can get around the hill.




Edited to say, Damn Fotango really suck for that pic, mail me if you wanna see it in greater detail.

best
Ex

[TheExcession]

TeamD said:

Does your e-mail work Ex? Or didn't you expect me to be me?

My e-mail should be working but I didn't see anything come back from you, unless the spm eater swallowed it.

Perhaps you could send it again.

cheers