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

maximizing coverage with the right antennas

[ubiquitin]

Cantennas are the wrong way to go, as their propagation pattern approximates linear, like the yagi designs. What you want is an omni, sometimes called marine, antenna that will spread signal in a plane. If you're in a greenhouse, I'm assuming you don't want strong signal going up or down, but horizontal in the plane of people walking around. Here's an example of one I grabbed from Google: radiolabs omni antenna For about another $30 you can pick up pigtails on eBay that let you attach these to the usual netgear/buffalo/d-link/linksys/etc. accesspoints. You can place them for effective 10Mbit coverage about one for every 2 acres assuming clean line of sight to the antennas and no major obstacles. Note that vegetation would definitely impact signal propagation in the 5.4ghz band.

Re: It's not like anyone CHECKS

[mebob]

You'd be suprised the kind complaint they respond to. My house used to have a very large antenna for TV(35 foot I think) because we were on the dark side of a mountain and couldn't recieve a signal from NYC. We also had a special motorized/pointable CB antenna. The guy next door, instead looking at the mountain and thinking, "hey the only reason they can a signal is because they have a giant antenna" thinks "hey they are plotting against me, and blocking my signal"

The FCC actually came and did tests, said that was silly and went home.

Re:DSL

[DrZaius]

You might also want to check out Ebay for some Cisco LRE stuff. There was a video floating around where John Chambers was doing video conferencing with LRE over speaker wire, phone wire, barbed wire and a wire fence -- the really impressive part was that it was 2 or 3 times longer than the max recommended distance.

out.

Why pay USD$55.00 when you can pay AUD$5.00...

[B747SP]

Oh how quickly we forget. Remember the parabolic chinese cookware in this slashdot story?

A friend pointed the site out to me about a week before it hit slashdot, so by the time the original story broke here, I had built one.

Long story short. They work really well. I've pwned every wireless access point within a 3Km radius of my house. Free Internet anyone? :-)