[KLUG Members] off topic: wireless networking long distance

[Adam Williams]

On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 22:13, Rusty Yonkers wrote:
> I am trying to find a relatively inexpensive solution to go about a
> quarter mile between two buildings for a network connection.  It does
> not have to be extremely high speed and I think I would have line of
> sight too.  
> I was looking at a D-Link high power 802.11b wap but they are
> $1000.00 each.  I need much less expensive for this to work out.... I
> am wondering if I put up an external antenna on an 802.11 b or g wap
> if I could make the quarter mile?  I do not know of anything else
> that would be inexpensive that would work.  

A quarter of a mile is like ~400 meters? You should be able to do this
pretty easy with external antenna.  I used panel antennax I got off
e-bay for ~$45 to create such a link.  One side was an Orinoco PCMCIA
card ($30) in a PMCIA/ISA adapter ($15) in a HP Vectra ($15) configured
as a router.  The other side was some kind of WAP that had an external
antenna facility; don't recall the brand/model but it wasn't anything
fancy or expensive.

Originally I wanted just use Orinoco cards in adhoc mode, but could
never, no matter what I did with iwconfig, get the cards to talk to each
other without a WAP (either a firmware or Linux driver thing I suspect).