At 3/10/2001 Saturday 02:06 PM, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote:
>Very likely a free line of site, hard to tell from the hill
>but hard to tell from all the trees, etc. I can mount something
>very high up and they are at a very strategic point on the
>hill. My budge is that it can't be more than $100 per month,
>but up front costs can run up to a couple of thousand. If
>TAD stock ever recovers I am just buying a T1, but until
>then I have to be judicious with my spending habits.
I've done something similar, over a much smaller distance (maybe 1000
yards). You want clear line of sight, even trees can be a problem. You can
cobble together standard 802.11b equipment, I had an old laptop running
linux with a lucent orinoco card at one end and an apple airport (which
contains an orinoco card) at the other. Two laptops with orinoco cards
could also be used. You can get directional antennas and the appropriate
cabling (orinoco cards have proprietary antenna connectors) from
hyperlink[1]. My run happened to be short enough that a homemade antenna
worked[2]. Total cost should be in the $500-1500 range.
If you want something more slick, you can buy outdoor wireless routers
designed specifically for this purpose[3]. With those you can do true
bridging, as opposed to either routing or NAT with the above hardware. They
also support such goodies as power-over-ethernet so you don't have to run
electricity to the wireless box (which you want as close as possible to the
antenna). Your total cost will be pushed to ~$3k, though.
1. http://www.hyperlinktech.com/
2. http://home.iprimus.com.au/jhecker/
3. http://www.wavelan.com/template.html?section=m61&page=1406&envelope=97
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:13:59 PDT