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Mid-Range Wireless Deployment for the Home User?
ronin78 asks: "My father just bought a five-acre farm with multiple buildings. I am looking for a way to set up a WLAN that covers the entire property. All I have been able to find are commercial solutions from various providers, all of which are close to or above a thousand dollars and measure coverage area in miles. Do Slashdot readers know how to provide wireless access for more than one house without blanketing the entire neighborhood (hopefully for a reasonable price)? Are there single, high-powered routers that will do the job?"
I'd just grab several WAP54Gs [or whatever your preference is in 802.11g APs], along with a single WRT54G [or whatever your preference is in 802.11g routers, again] and configure them for ad-hoc mode.
If you want something more complicated, configure one AP in infrastructure mode and configure the rest as repeaters.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/03/21 2210&tid=193&tid=222&tid=4 might be of interest
"My father just bought a five-acre farm with multiple buildings. I am looking for a way to set up a WLAN that covers the entire property.
Do you mean just around the buildings, or everywhere on the property? If it's the latter, use a handful of cheap WAPs and high tech Pringles can antennae on the out-buildings, pointed at the external antenna on the home.
Do Slashdot readers know how to provide wireless access for more than one house without blanketing the entire neighborhood (hopefully for a reasonable price)? Are there single, high-powered routers that will do the job?"
People are going to be able to snoop your RF communications if they want to. If you're worried about that, bury copper or fiber to the buildings. Otherwise, could I perhaps interest you in experimenting with laser communications? On the cheap? Now where did I stash those Laser Tag toys...
Here come da fudge!