quick backstory: moved up to the mountains where DSL was not available a few year back, a local company had a wifi offering using the Orinoco USB gold towers connected via the fattest cable I've ever seen to a 5.4GHZ 26 dBi Reflector Grid WLAN Directional Antenna mounted on my roof - looks like a big bbq grill. Have line of site to a local tower, all worked well but it was kinda pricey due to bandwidth constraints vs my usage. I used it for 2-3 years and it worked great. When DSL became available I made the switch over and stopped using the wifi but I still have the old wifi equip.
We have a cabin even further out in the woods that I'd like to redeploy this wifi equip over to so that I can get broadband in the remote location and work in a much more pleasant setting and setup a new account with the same local company. I have no prob removing the equip and relocating it myself. A tech from the same company who installed the equip at the house in town came out to the remote property a few years back and setup a dish on a tripod and using some sort of handheld running network monitoring software he confirmed that I did have a small window for line of sight to a local tower and would be able to install in the remote cabin location. I never ended up installing there, but now I would like to. But I'd like to do some of the setup in myself so that I can maybe take a few days/weeks and move the reflector grid around to different locations to see what works best. I'd rather not have an installer who is pressed for time take the first location he finds that may have a marginal signal and install there.
My prob is that I'd like to take down the equip on the house in town, shuttle it to the remote cabin and play around with figuring out where the best install location would be - but in order to do that I'd needs some software to run on my laptop(windows) or my palm (OS5) that would show me signal strength etc and help me confirm via actual testing that I'm in a good install spot. This is where I am completely out of my box, wifi at this level is new to me. I don't have an account with the local company yet to be able to log on to the network, but wondering - once I find the software - if I can bounce anon packets off the repeater on the tower to show me metrics about what I think I need to see to make a decision.
Thanks for taking the time to read thru all this, hoping for a few software application suggestions and maybe a heads up or 2 on problems that I am not considering.
mike