Connecting two buildings about 400ft away?

Look at the Tranzeo equipment at

cheaper than what you're playing with, will go much, much, much further than what you need. Run a cat5 cable outside, mount the radio, set them up, you're in business.

DSL in my area is 3Mbs for home use, up to 7.5Mbs for business.

Try a CISCO Aironet 350 wireless outdoor bridge. ($400-$500) a.. High-speed (11-Mbps), high-power (100-mW) radios, delivering building-to-building links of up to 25 miles (40.2 km) b.. A metal case for durability and plenum rating and an extended operating temperature rating for harsh environments c.. Supports both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations d.. Broad range of supported antennas e.. Simplified installation, improved performance, and upgradeable firmware, ensuring investment protection

Are you using the router antennas or have you fitted some external gain antennas and what type(s).

I have used a couple of home made biquads which have a gain of about 10dB and we have been getting reliable 6 Mbs links over some 300 odd yards with intervening trees and wooden building. The AP is a DLink 604T and the clients are simple Prism based USB adaptors mounted on the antenna. The AP feeds a 10 dBi Omni with 3 yards of LMR400 coax so feedline losses are quite low. We have even managed to reduce the AP output to about 25% from the nominal 30 mw and still have a good margin even in a rainstorm. Provided you lock the system down to lower speeds, the problems associated with multipathing with reflections and not true LOS do not appear to be significant. If it is only extending the DSL link, then even a 1 Mbs rate is more than adequate.

Peter

Line of sight means "Can you actually see it?" If there are trees, buildings, etc. in the way, expect problems. One maple tree may not be too bad, but a wooded lot ... problems. If you can't actually see the other building, figure out a way to where you can. What about from the rooftops? What if you had a 30' mast from Radio Shack on one or both of the buildings rooftops?

If you want to get just one product to use at one end, I'd recommend getting an access point to aim at the other building, so multiple clients can connect. But if they're in a glass and steel cage, I'd put an access point aiming at the building and a Tranzeo client bridge at the other end. Run that into the building and hook it up to a router.

As for distance, with proper line of sight and not too much radio noise in the area, they'll work for miles. As in maybe 15 miles. I don't have any need for that much distance (yet) but I've got smartBridges (very similar to Tranzeo, just more expensive and maybe not as good) running at two to three miles with rock solid connections.

Don't forget to set up security. Since these are 802.11b, the security isn't that great, but it's a lot better than nothing. Set up encryption and MAC filtering. There'll be people post that this is very easy to break, but it's only very easy if you're well versed in wireless stuff, most people aren't.

Like I said, I am doing 6 Mbs easily. Even with a 1 Mbs rate, can you read a web page that fast! There are sections in our area that can run gigabit to the internet via cable, now there is a real problem!

(all said tongue in cheek)