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Cringely's Bank Shot
Michael A. Lowry writes: "You may remember how Robert Cringely used a couple of directional antennas to get an 802.11b link up across a 10.5 km wide valley. The original Slashdot discussion is here. Well Cringely has done it again. This time, he has set up a passive repeater in an oak tree on a nearby mountaintop to bounce a 2 Mb/s signal around a hill that lies between his house and the acces point in Santa Rosa. Read about it here. Details about the homemade hardware he used can be found here. There's going to be a lot more of this in the near future."
...nothing but net.
:-)
~Eric
Let's say thousands of people do this in some general area to save a buck or two on broadband. Even with directional antennas, the noise floor could get pretty high. How much bandwidth will any one person have left?
I live in an area where if you are outside of a very small boundary, you cannot get high speed bandwidth regarless of what you're willing to pay. Some get satellite, the rest(majority) are forced to suffer with dialup.
This would be a big boon for us. I hope a clever company picks up the ball and runs with this.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
People want wireless access ANYWHERE.
I want it while I sit on the bus commuting to university. I want it when I'm relaxing at my friend's house. I want it when I'm sitting in my bathroom dumping core.
And no company is going to give this to us.
I want it unmetered. I don't mind paying a flat rate but I'm not going to sit in the dark ages of per minute cell phone charges. That would be useless.
And no company is going to do that, either.
So we all have to be like Cringely....
I already have a WAP in my house, albeit a low power one. Come summertime I might buy an antenna for it so I can get a decent connection when outside in my large property.
Imagine if everybody did this. Imagine if half the houses on your street had a WAP with the SSID set to something like "freewire" or something, seamlessly providing wireless access wherever you go via people's boradband links.
NAN - neighbourhood area network.
Now if only I didn't live in outer suburbia where my neighbours have never heard of the Internet and houses are too far apart to make this worthwhile...
I know this isn't the same, but where I live there is a company getting wireless broadband to rural towns by putting atennas and transmitters on the top of grain elevators. This works out pretty good since the terrane is flat and you can see another elevator from the top of your current one. I don't know how much area they cover, but it seems to be an interesting solution.
The house my friends and I live in is in a multi-media deadzone.
No cable because we're too isolated and far up a hill.
No satellite access because the house is surrounded by trees and blocks the signal.
DSL doesn't reach out here.
Cell phone coverage exists but is fairly crappy.
I consider it a minor miracle the house gets a phone line.
We don't live in some rural area; we live in a suburb outside Seattle that's fairly dense. Everyone around us gets this stuff but we can't.
I always saw directional IEEE 802 as very cool. Since you are keeping the same wattage on the emission, are you clear legally (as far as the FCC goes)? It makes sense that you wouldn't be violating anything; rather than radiating it out weakly in all directions, you're focusing that same energy on a tiny spot in the distance. In either case, you're not upsetting the airwaves in general for other people.
Anyone know?
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Cringely mentions that he is indeed violating the DSL provider's TOS but doesn't think that he can be caught. What is to stop the DSL provider from TCP/IP fingerprinting his router and terminating service?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
...in my book for that stunt. Yeah, he's full of wind and lofty opinions and predictions. But it takes a proper hacker to roll up the sleeves, climb a mountain and a big tree, simply to install a wireless hack.
He da man.
When construction begins in a populated area, utility companies, including telco and cable operators, are responsible for coming out and flagging their under-ground wires, pipes, conduits, repeaters, and switch boxes.
A lot of amature 802.11b hackers are building a utility infrastructure, wether they think they are or not and even if it's for their own private use.
In the VERY near future, wireless devices like this are going to have to become *very* durable to stand up to long-term outdoor use... and I don't mean having a water-tight battery compartment. A lot of the stuff out there... Pringle Can antennas, anyone?... is homerolled hacks.
Things like wireless routers and repeaters, however, need to be designed with things like natural disaster, wild animals, and vandalism in mind.
Ever wonder why public utility stuff is so bulky and hard to get into?
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
What is sweet is that this is on PBS. I love public TV and I love it more that we get to see free cool stuff like this.
I bet that he isn't the first to do this either. I have a friend who lives accross the street from his ISP and has tried multiple times to get a strand of fiber run to the main switch (he is friends with the owner). Before I moved and lost contact with him he was working on a radio based method of getting 100Mbps using multiplexing and directional antennas. At less than 300 feet it seemed feasible. This was of course before 802.11x and I am sure he has looked into this. The company we worked for there has a few wireless net connections but the microwave setup we were looking at for 100Mbs and even OC-3 speeds was big bucks! About $10,000 for a single site. Are there any cheaper solutions for that kind of speed?
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
I work for a company that will be hosting an access point for an isp. In return we get a reduced rate on the bandwidth that we purchased (DS3). I live not too far from work/the access point and will be given free service (not relevant, but cool anyway :)).
The reason this company's solution just might work is this: They are installing multiple access points at businesses in my area. Each tranceiver (yes, everyone's antennae both receives and transmits the network signal, widening the effective range) that is brought online is assigned to a specific access point. As bandwidth starts to saturate a given access point, a new access point is to be brought online by splitting the cost with a business that will play host. That just may be what is needed to make wireless work, instead of becoming a choked alternative to 56k.
Just maybe it will make high bandwidth available to the poor saps (myself included) that can't get dsl or cable.
-Pride
Mo' power, Cringe.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
What about taking 802.11 everywhere a bit further, and putting websites, FTP servers, P2P, etc on the 802.11 hubs? By doing that(within reason), you're not worried about metered access since there's no ISP involved.
On "This Old Geek hosted by McGyver" Feb 29th (not availiable on all PBS stations, ask your parents for permission first.)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
We'd like a Cringely icon, please, to go along with his own section.
You can perform a simple search to see just how many times his material has been posted as a new story on the front of Slashdot.
He's not a God, but he's damn close. His articles are almost always interesting and sometimes he even manages to produce original ideas that are quite captivating.
I don't think I'm the first one to suggest this, either...
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Has Cringely read this article which basically says the hack he's using to increase his Linksys WAP11 power output DOES NOT WORK?
It's passive. No power needed. Basically, a wave received from one antenna will travel down a transmission line to an antenna connected at the other end and radiate out (and vice versa) with very little loss.
But face it, the all-you-can-eat model doesn't work. Bandwidth aint free, and if you give people unlimited access to it, they'll take advantage of you.
That's why ISPs have started capping bandwith. They have to pay for it. If they can't recover their bandwidth costs from you in connect-time charges, then they just have to find ways to limit the amount of bandwidth they provide.
Which is why Cringley will probably will probably get a stern warning from his wireless provider. They're charging him on the assumption that he's an occasional user, not somebody pumping megabits up and down all day.
What would be ideal is a scheme where the connect-time is flat-rate, but every packet past your pre-paid allotment costs. People (like Cringely) who have greater needs would end up negotiating slightly higher monthly fees with a higher allotment. Casual users would get off cheaper. And the ISPs could forget about all the weird rules designed to root out re-sellers and heavy users.
No satellite access because the house is surrounded by trees and blocks the signal.
Enter the chainsaw! Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
i hate pansy republicans
In the 70's it was Cap'n Crunch, now it's Pringles. Odds are P&G will soon be modifying the design of their "snack" packaging to make sure that 2.4 GHz waves can't use 'em.
There's going to be a lot more of this in the near future.
Not once the bureaucrats find out about what he's up to.
And I must say that in this case they would probably be correct. Can't have everyone walking around polluting the EM spectrum.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Now all I have to do is grow the tree to bounce the signal off.
Federal agencies have juristiction in two instances :
A) The activity in question crosses two states. And you are correct, this does not cross state lines.
B) The regulation in question is in effect for more than one state. AH! FCC interference and broadcast regs are nationwide. Thats why they get jurisdiction.
(this is from somebody that emailed Cringe)
I set one up this morning. I put a two year-old two Mbps AP with an 18dBi directional antenna on top of our downtown San Jose WiPoP, and pointed it at the Starbucks, Rock 'N Tacos, Spiedo restaurant, and the Campbell Cigar shop below. It works great. I got 1.2 Mbps inside these places with my WiFi card. I didn't have to ask Starbucks, nor offer to pay them anything!"
Does anyone else smell the start of a new type of stupid law, one that says you can't beam otherwise permitted radio waves into buildings?
Say, didn't you sit in front of me in algebra?
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
What Cringely didn't mention is that he also has a modified 10 megawatt directional microwave oven pointing at said parking spots. This keeps most objects infront of his house crisp and/or sparky.
Ultimately the Internet is going to become useless, taken over by AOL/Time-Warner and a handful of other major providers, all in control of Big Media. At that time, we'll need to set up our own nationwide, underground, wireless IP network. And it's ideas like this that are going to make it work. Here's how:
We start with neighborhood wireless LANs. A few WAPs on the block, and forthcoming wireless technology will allow the WAPs to uplink to one another. It's not all that different from the old BBS, except that it's over the airwaves, rather than over the phone, the bandwidth is about 1000x better, and it's completely public.
Then we get some Cringely-esque techniques in place to route between different neighborhood LANs. Set an IP router in front of several microwave links to other IP routers, each in a nearby town/neighborhood. This would be like a wireless version of the old FidoNet.
If we can get the whole nation connected, we can then have P2P-paradise that the Media companies can't touch. Well, except that bandwidth would suck, and it would be able to scale for anything. Only, I'm looking at 5 or 10 years down the road, after technology has taken a few leaps forward.
And, you could have access to this network virtually anywhere you can take an 802.11 device. And don't get me started on the Voice-over-IP possibilities.
That would *rule*.
dinner: it's what's for beer
That doesn't necessarily make it legal, though - take a look at some of the recent action by the FCC against people and organizations violating the Communications Act of 1934/1996. The interesting thing is that against individuals, a good deal of the action seemed to focus on pirate radio.
I found this stuff from the FCC interesting, too:
Of course, if you have a lot of free time to kill, you can read the whole Communications Act of 1934, but I don't think there's going to be much on wireless networking in there. I think for now, since Cringely is already a subscriber to the ISP that he's banking off of, he should be fine, especially since the FCC is allowing people to set up Low Power FM stations in their homes. There doesn't really seem to be any precedence to this from the FCC's point of view.First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. --Ghandi
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
...when your co-workers are installing 802.11b equipment above you. Here's a link to a page I put up that has a video clip of what almost happened to us when a wrench was dropped from 150ft. on a tower.
The Unwired
So, having proved the concept, I am going to go back to my slightly less offensive bootleg DSL connection until I can find out who owns that oak tree and make my new installation legit.
I was going to suggest getting a plat book from the Sonoma county extension office. But I called them, and they don't do plat books... (Maybe plat books are just a midwestern thing. I'm used to most every farmer having a plat book that shows who owns which acreage.)
So it looks like for Cringely to find out who owns that part of Bennett Mountain he's going to have to go to the Recorder or Assessor's office and find it on a map there.
I thought that even his boosted signal was low enough to be considered unregulated. At that point, there is no FCC guidelines concerning interference. Were he using a 10 watt transmitter, he WOULD be regulated because he might interfere.
The danger of using anything in the unregulated area is that you might get hosed by other unregulated users. If you need the reliability/durability/security, you have to pay for it.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You're the type of person who calls the cops on the local pirate radio station, aren't you?
For those moderators not paying attention, the parent post is an obvious troll.
This is precisely why we need the FCC to regulate people's use of this equipment.
Cringely's setup is regulated by the FCC and is within FCC specifications. There is nothing illegal (as far as the FCC is concerned) here.
Did Bob Cringely ask a single person living in downtown what they thought of his terrific internet access plan?
Why would he? Does the neighborhood get a vote every time someone turns on a cell phone? What about when a ham radio operator fires up his 1,500 watt amp? What about when someone turns on a microwave oven?
What about the those people who use approved wireless equipment (phones, wireless networking) and now have to deal with the background noise
Cringely was using an FCC type-accepted device well within its specifications. Did you miss that part of his article?
coming from his souped up repeater?
His 'souped up repeater', as you call it, is a couple of antennas back to back. It's passive. His antennas don't put out power, they just focus the energy. With 18db of gain, his 100mw signal is still under five effective watts.
Wait, I'm sure he did a thorough study of his setup to make sure that it didn't interfere with transmissions by public safety agencies, right?
Dude, take a basic radio class. He isn't changing the operational frequency. He isn't using an illegal amp that might cause out of band splatter. His third order distortion won't be affected by a passive antenna. There is harmless.
What stopped him from using a 10 watt transmitter, so that the connection would be even faster?
If he had a ham radio license, he could legally run up to 1,500 watts of power, operate an active repeater and use whatever antenna array he wanted all in the same frequency range he is using now. As an added bonus, he still wouldn't have to fill out any paperwork, get any government approval or take a poll of his neighbors.
Follow the rules and don't subject other people to your homebrewed technology.
Once again, other than unlawful use of a tree for the purposes of geekness, I he hasn't broken any rules.
If you want to learn something about radio (and, trust me, you're really ignorant now), why not surf on over to the American Radio Relay League. They represent hams across the world. They have some very good teaching materials. If you study hard, maybe you can even get a ham license. It really is pretty nifty.
InitZero
One word - lightning.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
*shrug* I really doubt the FCC is going to worry too much about 2.4GHz stuff. It's a largely unregulated band. So many devices use that frequency range, so some really bad things would happen if it changed.
However, the FCC still has restrictions. I think there's a limit to how much transmitting power you can use (or, at least, a limit to how much is detectable a certain distance away).
Other than placing a repeater on property that is not his own, I don't see anything wrong here. Cringely is just pretending that he's sitting downtown at a coffee shop. He's paying for the bandwidth he's using.
Anyway, I think 802.11 is a very liberating technology. Provided that people who set up such networks follow some sort of standard (which probably hasn't been built yet, but it probably will be before too long), this could really be a big step in the evolution of the Internet.
For the last several years, it's been commercialized to the extreme. There are people who just want to use it to connect to others, and experiment with the technology.
Oh well, I suppose I'm just an idealistic bastard...
Ummmm, see my earlier post. I think he *is* obeying all laws, rules, regulations. If you're only emitting 1 watt in the 2.4ghz band, you're allowed to directionally focus it, etc..
If he were amplifying it beyond limits, and publishing an article about it, it would be the height of stupidity, and he'd likely be charged. He's not that stupid.
At first, when I first read him, I was worried cringely was a Chaos Manor Wannabe (and why anybody would want to be another Chaos Manor, would escape me), but this guy actually has pretty good insight and cool articles.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Rather than competing, all you have to do is co-operate.
:)
http://www.freenetworks.org/
The more the merrier.
Deleted
I've done some work myself on making a passive repeater for other purposes. I've found that even duct-taping a copper circle of one wave length onto my usb wireless adapter for my laptop will improve link quality more than 10% when you go through a few obstacles. I've been lazy, but if you want to do something pretty cool build a directional antenna (any with good gain) and run the cable to a copper circle of length 11.168cm(Ch 6) (don't connect the ends to each other, just to the coaxial cable). This should give you much better gain and distance on your laptop :) you could build the double quad antenna (double the wave length in length, looks like and you connect the coax to the center such that it ends up being two stacked quads), and it would give you at least 3db gain more than a single quad and be omnidirectional so you can move your laptop around :) There are lots of documentation on how to build these antenna's. Build a couple and connect them to each other and viola, you've got a passive repeater.
Karma Clown
http://www.freenetworks.org/
Deleted
How bout /. gets some negotiations going to swap Katz for Cringely with PBS. Sounds like a hell of a trade. At least I can get through an entire Cringely article without getting the dry heaves.
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
It's a really huge tree on someone else's property. The house is surrounded by trees. Besides, we're renting the house.
And moving ain't much of an option because we're getting a pretty damn good deal on rent. Housing this cheap is hard to find this close to Seattle.
Sigh, another person who didn't read the article. The repeater is a passive repeater, a threaded rod, some washers, and some PVC pipe to seal it up in. The only thing "souped up" was his base station. Which is still at his house. On the other side of the hills.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I can think of one way the ISP could track him:
1) send emails to his pbs.org mail address that will generate a reply (ether by nasty scripting tricks, or simply asking him to respond...)
2) Look at the IP address of the reply.
If he does it from his home, they have the IP of his buddy. End game.
Second trick - look around in the specified neighborhood for a transmitter at 2.6GHz. Sniff with Snort.
It reminds me of an old saying: "If you are breaking the the rules, be QUIET about it."
www.eFax.com are spammers
I'm part of the crew at www.wireless.org.au - and we've been doing some distance testing on standard 11Mbps 802.11 equipment.
2 /07/4863496 regarding this.
We successfully negotiated a link at 11Mbps over 14.6km and are trying to go for 36.5km when time allows.
check out the quick post at http://www.wireless.org.au/stories.php?story=02/0
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
You missed the end of the article where he says this whole thing was just an experiment, and he plans to go back to his old service until he can find a way to make it legit.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
I had the same thought when I first read Cringely's article, but you're missing something here. The hold the media companies have on us isn't through hardware, it's through Congress.
As long laws like the DMCA (or the future SSSCA) are around, there are no "safe" alternatives. Illegal is illegal, and anything large scale will be shut down.
The thing is, if we had the clout to get rid of the DMCA, we wouldn't *need* to build an alternative way.
If we want free networks, the infrastructure we really need to hack is Congress.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I've been stockpiling the $1.19 WiFi antennas, but am running out of room for the dozens of little wave-shaped shipping protection cushions that I find in each can.
The cashier told me you're supposed to eat them, but I think he's just out to get me after I 'accidentally' tried to pay with the copper slugs leftover from waveguide construction. Hey, at 6AM after a long night of wardriving, it's an easy mistake to make.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Ahem very little loss is awfullly mis leading...
if you attain a 3db loss of signal you lost 50% of that signal. the feedline he uses has at least 3db of loss and you also lose 1-2 db per connector. he is losing a significant amount of signal.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
A free cookie to whoever finds the aerial, steals it, takes pictures of it and sends a ransom note to Cringley. Come on, you know you want to. A great project for a bored geek in his area.. FAME AND FORTUNE AWAIT!
mogorific carpentry experiments
Not really. Any filter at any frequency (even audio frequencies) is going to have tradeoffs in the passband where there will be some distortion. Normally things like phase distortion get severe when you're trying to do something this tight.
Think of it this way. Say your 802.11b carrier is 2 MHz wide (I have no idea if that's what it really is) and is centered at 2.400 GHz. If you want to filter out everything but that carrier, you want your filter to A) block every thing below 2.399 GHz, B) block everything above 2.401 GHz and C) pass everything in between. And you want the rolloff (think cliffs) at those edge frequencies to be steep. Well, guess what: that's really really hard to do -- it's like you're asking the RF circuitry to reach waaaaay out to 2.4 GHz and then pick out a little 2 MHz slot. That's strictly military-grade stuff :)
The real problem with the whole Linksys mod is that you're driving the power amp into saturation, and THAT's what causes all that intermod to poke up. All RF amps can push X watts going full blast, but you need to "back off" a certain amount in order to get a clean signal through and not produce intermod. Typical backoffs are in the range of 2-7 dB. So Linksys builds a 100mW amp but intends to only use 25mW of that, for a backoff of 6 dB.
One simple rule for its versus it's
...the PBS site goes down? It usually takes a week after he writes something new before I can see it. Is it because www.pbs.org is some dinky old server that takes a week to get up again after a slashdotting? Lately Slashdot's been linking to every article he writes, so of course, everyone's gonna try to look at it. This behavior has been consisten since I started reading Cringely's articles regularly last year.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I myself live in a bandwidth black hole which I just happen to be in the center of. So, I actually started researching and buying gear to hook into work's T1, which is about 4.8 miles away. The gear I decided on was two Orinoco (or WaveLAN as they used to be called) cards with Linux boxes to match to keep costs down (besides, Linux makes for a great wireless router). My antennas are 24dBi gain Hyperlink parabolic grid antennas. I already have the cards working in my Linux installations and am ready to hook up the antennas soon. The only tricky part is that my path to work is slightly obscured so I'm hoping I have enough power and gain to be able to punch though. Hopefully the bandwidth gods will look favorably upon me. I've never had a high speed connect at home (and probably never will if this doesn't work :/)
:)) I also asked how he got around mountains and such.
One of the coolest projects I found while researching this was the HPWREN project at UCSD. Check out their pictures, it's hella cool. In a nutshell they are running a 45Mbps (802.11a) wireless backbone across the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve using mostly off-the-shelf equipment, for the purpose of hooking together the facilities strewn across it. They even have remote cameras hooked in that can be remotely controlled through the network, and other testing stations that send data back to them in realtime.
I dropped an email to the project lead and I asked him what kind of gear they used. He said they used a Western Multiplex Tsunami for their backend, Hyperlink for their antennas and WaveLAN and Cisco Aironet for their PCMCIA cards (you can now see how I constructed my parts list
Well, in certain places they have powered relay stations. Naturally I wondered how they were powered, and he said some of them they could get electricity to, but others they actually have solar panels powering the relays. Damn. For you real hackers he mentioned there was a parts list for the solar power array somewhere on the website, but I never bothered to try and find it.
I've noticed some arguments regarding amplifying 802.11, and thought I'd help clear it up. FCC Part 15.247 governs the unlicensed ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) band, and dictates that you can amplify the signal up to 1 watt (1000mw) This gets tricky when you start using directional antennas >6dBi gain though. You may find more detailed info here..
-R
You are only "in fact stealing power" if the land does not "in fact" belong to you.
On the other hand, if you own the land, it is entirely possible that what you're 'stealing' is the current that someone volunteered to put over your property. Which might not be stealing at all.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Infoworld's "I Cringely" column has been written by different people under that pseudonym. Do we know who is actually doing this?
m l
One of the previous columnists - Mark Stephens - has been using the names for books (Accidental Empires) and tv (Nerds series). There have been at least two more Bob Cringely's since him in Infoworld.
More info at: http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/summer96/0088.ht
[)amien
[)amien
But when ISPs buy bandwith, the more or less buy it as a commodity, and they have to pass on that commodity cost.
If you're suggesting that local providers use the monopoly or near-monopoly status to keep prices up -- well, there's certainly plenty of precedent for that. I remember being terribly excited when ISDN started rolling out in the late '80s, with data rates ten times that of existing modems. But of course the telecoms that owned ISDN didn't even understand the concept of "commodity", so few found ISDN worth the expense and trouble.
But I'm not sure I see the same thinking behind current ISP policies. They do want heavy users to pay more -- but why shouldn't they? I just wish they'd find a more realistic way to measure usage.
What really scares me is that more and more ISP are writing off low-end users as unprofitable. If the Internet is to ever live up to its potential, it has to be totally pervasive.
He's only going about a few km or so. At that distance, you're
talking a distance-imposed latency of, oh, microsecond-ish.
(3 nanos/meter, 1000 meters/km, 3 microseconds/km).
Latency due to packet switching, "traffic jams", etc. are going
to far exceed that. After all, wireless travels at speed-of-light-ish,
which is actually faster than having wire run to your house.
I'm not saying there isn't additional latency due to the protocol -
it's just that I guarantee that the latency of wireless at 1 m
vs. the latency at wireless at 1 km, with sufficient signal
strength, is only gonna be about 3 micros longer. Note the
"sufficient signal strength". Check to see if you're dropping tons
of packets or something - your signal strength might be horrible.
The correct fix would be a little 6-10db amp on the output of the Linksys, giving nice, clean power out to that 18db dish. Anyone have a source?
My suggestion would be Down East Microwave . They have lots of quality hardware. They say they won't sell 2.4 gHz stuff to non-hams but if you know enough to use the hardware, you can probably bluff your way along.
A 21dB pre-amp (for the RX end) is just $85 (and totally legal for anyone to use). If you are not a ham and want to break federal laws, check out their 2.3-2.4 linear amp. With one watt drive, it'll put out 15 watts. They make an amp that will put out 120 watts but it requires 10-20 watts of drive.
Trust me, folks, if you know a bit about electronics and want to do cool radio stuff, get a ham license. It'll cost you less than $20 (plus the cost of a book if you want to study first). In coolness alone, you'll be paid back many times over.
InitZero