Extended wireless network?

Not a silly question, actually a quite common one. Drop the Ham radio licenses out of the picture. 2.4 GHZ is right next to if not inside of the 2.4 ghz ham band. There are a couple of options if they have a line of sight RF path between them. 1. Add antennas, 2.4 ghz yagis are available off the shelf, as are bidirectional Rf amplifiers.Adding antennas is more importanat then adding transmit power, as your friends probably know. Do some googling on extending wireless range and a bunch of sites are available with ideas and tested devices. Alos there are some long range commerical license free units. Keep the RF cable to the antennas short, it is very easy to loose any antenna gain in the cable to the antenna at 2 ghz and up.

The reason for dropping the ham part is, with some exceptions, transmitting for commericial uses over ham frequencies is not legal. (ie you could use the autopatch once in while to order a pizza, but not on a daily basis.) Also hacking a part 15 unit fof ham use may be quite legal, as long as only ham to ham data runs on it, but then hooking it to the internet is questionable.

Steve Roberts N8VKD.

I've spoken to somebody who managed to get a 1Mb/s wireless connection in the 5GHz band wich spans about 2.5 miles with a hill covered with forest in between. They needed amplifiers to boost the signal to several Watts. If you have a line of sight, then it is much easier. Get a wireless router and 2 dish antennas. Look at

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Seattle wireless has done quite a bit of work on long range links, within the FCC limits.

another good site..

Cheers

Frankly, I think it's an excellent question. But I have no idea what the answer is - there are wireless modems, here's one hit from a google search on '"long-range" wireless modem':

they seem to have a model that'll do 50 miles, line-of-sight, with

15 dBi antennas.

They're a thousand bucks, though.

But, if you can find out the freq, and license requirements, anything can be built, if you've got the time and money. ;-)

Good Luck! Rich

Remember the "good ol' days" of ham radio, where everything above 10 GHz was open territory?

Sheesh! These days, it's all allocated, at least in the US:

So I don't know about finding an empty spot of spectrum. Maybe on one of the RC channels, if you had really tight antenna patterns. ;-)

Good Luck! Rich

I've run two 24dBi dishes over 1 mile with a couple of netgear WG602v3's in bridge mode.. line of sight.. but five may not be possible without amplifiers.. your ham friends should be able to calculate the dB drop over the path and the required sig to noise ratio etc....... it's not my field.. so I cant help further, but my experiment was successful..

Some New Zealand guys got a fair distance using WiFi with some pretty cheap parts:

Chris.

I appreciate everyone's suggestions. I'll pass along the links.

For my own education, could someone explain this part for me:

The various wireless devices I see at BestBuy or whereever have at most a small single telescoping pole antenna. But for a long distance connection, I would think it would be best to have separate dish antennas, and possibly amplifiers, for transmit and receive. (I'm assuming something like a wireless router does use separate frequencies for xmit and rec.) Are there wireless routers or cards that give you the choice of using external antennas? I mean, like jacks on the back for that purpose?

Sorry to ask this. I did digital and analog designs in another life, but not RF, which, as you all know, requires a magic decoder ring.

try here

martin

As long as you have line of sight, why not use light? That has not yet been gobbled by big corporations and the government. Using visible or IR diode transmit array or laser and a cheap telescope with photocell as detector. The rest of the interface is left as a project for the reader. ;) (but i could suggest the audio i/o of two modems)

Sjouke Burry wrote: ...

There are numerous homemade installations of 10-Mbips ronja (see eg

and "124 Registered Installations of Ronja" at ) in the 1 to 1.4 km range. For 5 mile range (~ 8 km) perhaps one could substitute telescopes (or binocular halves) in place of the simple lenses that ronja uses. Also see link to 3 km ronja with laser diode. (Of course, the OP hasn't said whether the site would allow line-of-sight connection.)

-jiw

The old 802.11b Orinico PC cards had a removable antenna and a mmc jack. I dealt with these guys, and they have an SMC with connectors, 200mw.

Both transmit and recieve are on the same freq. The multiple antennas you see, are automatically switched in or out depending on the recieve strenght on that antenna. Most links will only use one of the antenna connectors.

Not most long distance links are 10mpbs 802.11b.

Cheers

In article , Rich Grise wrote: [...]

There are no allocated channels below 1Hz.

There are also no channels up above 100THz and it is fairly easy to make things very directional up there. If it truely is "line of sight", making something up there may be a fun project.

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