Wide Area Wireless on a Shoestring Budget?

wkytechhead asks: "My father owns a greenhouse operation that covers a few dozen acres. He has a number of greenhouses some up to 1000' plus apart that he would like to network. Currently he is using a HomePNA based network via regular RJ12. He has decided that he would like to go at least partially wireless. Some consideration has been given to using the backbone with fiber convertors, but he would really like to do full wireless. I have checked into homemade and commercial 'Cantennas' but I am not sure if they are worth the money. How would my fellow geeks go about wirelessly networking a large outdoor area for as cheap as possible?"

Comments

Cows

[Anonymous Coward]

Wire cheap antennas to cows.

Problem solved :)

Re:Cows

[Abm0raz]

Or raise a herd of antennalope instead.

-Ab

sounds like a plan...

[Haydn Fenton]

1. use greenhouses for greenhouse-like things 2. ??? 3. profit! 4. buy dedicated satellite

building your network

[Mr. Falco]

I would find the central point and place broadcast point there and at the end of that one range place 2 at the other points to max. range and give full coverage. Nice idea. I am working on something like that for my wine cellar.

Re:building your network

[speedphreak]

How big is your freaken wine cellar?

Re:building your network

[zakezuke]

Nice idea. I am working on something like that for my wine cellar.

I can see the benifit. So much faster to ping a bottle to see if it's corked or not. No more wasted trips to the cellar. You better be careful and block port 25 from you cellar... some of those Brazil wines are known spammers.

The obvious..

[Anonymous Coward]

Create a beowulf cluster of plants!

Cut down all the trees

[Anonymous Coward]

and cheap commodity equipment will thusly suffice.

The cheapest way, wireless repeaters every 100'

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

I would have workers every 100' and they would throw packets back and forth. The workers would not need to know TCP/IP since they would not even need to operate at Level 1, they would just act as repeaters/fowarders, only needing to know whether to throw a packet to the next or to the previous worker and that would be easy because they would just have to make sure not to return the packet to the worker they got it from. This repeater/forwarding mechanism works well and requires no additional expenses since the workers would be hired to do actual work in the garden anyway. Oh and did I mention the workers are wireless as well?

Re: It's not like anyone CHECKS

[brianosaurus]

Yeah. The FCC typically just responds to complaints. As long as you don't paint a picture of Janet Jackson's nipple on the antenna you should be fine.

RFC 1149

[teval]

Can't get much cheaper. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html

Re:RFC 1149

[SuneSpeg]

RFC1149 are known to suffer from big packetloss during hunting season...

Re: It's not like anyone CHECKS

[jdray]

Well, at least you'd know which way the thing was pointed...

Re:Always remember--to think outside the box.

[TeknoHog]

> That inexpensive means inefficient.

Sometimes the opposite is true.

With software in particular :)

Sumatrabucks

[MorboNixon]

Just convince the city to run two perpendicular streets through your property. The resulting intersection will produce no fewer than 4 Starbucks coffee shops, each with their own wi-fi transmitter. Problem solved.