Help, I need to bridge 200 feet of wilderness

The cheapest? Run CAT5 cable. Plop it on the ground. Should work until the citters start chewing on it.

Is it too cold to do trenching or horizontal drilling? Waterproof and gel filled CAT5 is about $140/1000ft.

Trees are fatal. I live in a redwood forest with a rather dense overgrown wall of trees in all directions. Propogation varys from difficult to impossible. The best solution for propogation issues is a chain saw.

Run conduit under the brook. Schedule 80 is very strong and waterproof.

2.4GHz will not go through cement walls. Shooting through windows will work if they are NOT covered with energy efficient aluminized mylar.

You might want to try expanding your existing wireless system by adding higher gain antennas to your existing hardware. As a rule of thumb, 6dBi gain is double your range. 12dBi is 4 times your range. However, line of sight is critical. If the end points can barely see each other, you *MIGHT* get a connection but there's no guarantee it will be stable. As the trees move, collect snow, change with the seasons, and grow, the path will change. Chain saw time.

If you can't get line of sight, methinks this might be a good use for fiber optic cable. The stuff is not cheap, but I suspect can be obtained surplus. Same with the fiber to ethernet converters. The cable is impervious to water damage and can be snaked inside non-metalic conduit, PVC sprinkler tubeing, or improvised conduit.

Fiber to ethernet converter for $12.

'll need two.

The trees might be a problem. As far as putting the radios outside, I don't think that's necessary. I ran some tests with my inexpensive equipment (Netgear MR814v2 router, Zonet ZEW2501 dongle - one of which melted yesterday :) to see if glass or window screens blocked the signal. I found almost no loss of signal in going through glass or window screens. I wasn't surprised about the glass, but I was surprised to see that the screens didn't block the signal. So I would just put the radios on the window sills and not worry about putting them outside.

Bruce

I have about 4 chain saws. They all work just fine. Also do chain saw repair when I'm bored with high tech. However, I didn't suggest mowing down the forest. Just trim a few big branches to get clearance. Usually if one chops the lower branches, line of sight can be obtained.

Yep. That's the right way to do it. Lots of antenna gain where possible. Cable? Haven't you been reading the trade journals? In a few years, we'll all have fiber to the home. Sigh...

Thanks you so much everyone! I'm going to have to think this through and scope it out some more, but I can't tell you how much I appreciate the advice!

Jeff's advice, re a chainsaw, is good even if he intended it to be facetious (I'm not saying he _did_... :-)). If you can get a clear line of sight by cutting trees, then you have no problem.

Not to mention salty if you're near the coast.

I'm doing very much the same as you (also in NS). I moved my satellite dish to the neighbor's house 1000' away (let _her_ pay for the power!), connected a Linksys WRT54G wireless router to the sat-modem and put it in her living-room window (no external antenna). At my house, I connected a second WRT54G to a 24dbi external antenna fixed to the outside of my house, pointing at her window. In a few years I may need to take a saw to a tree or two, but maybe I'll have cable by then.

Compared to a rural telephone line :-(

Since WiFi is line of sight, much depends on how much obstruction there is.

I suggest you first try a D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G DWL-2100AP Wireless Access Point with a D-Link ANT24-1400 14dBi Directional Panel Antenna at your house, with the antenna aimed at the other house, and see if that's enough for a standard wireless device to connect at the other house. If not, you could try a similar directional antenna at the other house.

Yeah, right. I had fiber to within 100' of my house in my last home, and couldn't get DSL. I have cable across the lake, which is what I was aiming to get connected to this summer, but that fell through. Right now, I don't even have a copper phone line.

If you want to try running hardwire on the cheap, you probably could use the thinner cat3 four conductor phone wire for a ~10mb connection between the computers. To do the trenching use a lawn edger gizmo to dig a thin slit in the ground and stuff the wire down in the slit. This has very little impact on the lawn and is pretty quick. Critters may eventually chew on the wire, but then it is an easy and quick thing to do. I've run phone wire to out buildings like this to save serious digging up of my yard.

A friend had the same problem with his local cable and telco provider. He really didn't want to run his own cable, internet, and telco utility or ISP. He just wanted the service. So, he started making noisy and obvious inquiries about trenching at the local planning department, requested bids for running fiber around his town, asked the local dialup ISP to survey the area to see if they were interested in a municipal LAN, and bent the ear of the politicians with technobabble about municipal data services.

He also had his son ship him a pile of assorted ancient routers and switches, which he left in conspicuous places for everyone to see. I contributed a useless Cisco 100baseT hub. Soon, the phone calls started dribbling in from city haul, from the local cable monopoly, and from the hole in the wall telco, asking what he was planning. Answers were intentionally vague except for the business aspects where he asked them about revenue and regulatory issues. He said they sounded worried. There was also a well researched article on municipal datacomm in the local paper.

About a month after this song and dance, the local telco announced that it was expanding their services to include DSL. A little while later, the cable monopoly arrived with a hastely conceived "pilot program" that would provide CATV, internet, and VoIP service. Meanwhile, city haul was making serious noises about municipal fiber and sponsoring a cable cooperative.

It's now about 10 months after the start of the song and dance. He now had DSL and the trenching plans for CATV is in the planning boards hands.

Did you know that CAT3 is now *MORE* expensive than CAT5? That's because CAT3 is rapidly being replaced by CAT5 and there's much more CAT5 being produced than CAT3.

What's a lawn? I live in the forest.

So far, the best covering I've found for protecting cable running through the forest floor is electrical non-metallic tubing (ENT) also known as "smurf tube". Slitting the forest with a lawn edger will fail when the blade hits a root or a rock. However, a rented Ditch Witch trencher works just fine.

smurf tube isn't really made for buried service, but seems to work better than my previous experiment, using garden hose. I would use black PVC tubing, but it's too hard to handle and has to be buried too deep. So far, no critters have chewed through it.

Also handy is a horizontal drill for going under the roads. I usually rent these:

As, apparently, does Mr. Ob.

He didn't say whereabouts in Nova Scotia he was, but 90% of the province is rock...

I used one of those just once. What a blast! Sure beats digging.

Well, there are different types of forests. In the local forest, it was clear cut in 1906 to help rebuild San Francisco after the earthquake and again in the 1940's to help fight WWII. It's not terminally overgrown. It's not the branches, leafs, and needles that are in the way of the RF patch. It's the huge number of tree trunks.

In that case, the lawn edger and Ditch Witch are not going to work. I've never seen a dense forest built on rock. It ususally takes softer soil to hold enough moisture to support a big tree. Dunno what to do about rock.

Maybe another plan would be to use power line networking between buildings. If there's a common power line, it's possible to use them for networking.

Yep. Goes right through tree roots, PVC water pipe, my old bootleg CATV coax cable. I think I probably did more good than damage, but it sure beat digging by hand. However, drilling horizontally under the road was a bit more work. I've done it about 4 times and each time, I hit a rock, water pipe, or buried treasure. It seems that the locals buried all their old foundation blocks and construction debris in the road before paving.

Well, I should probably have said "rocks". There are plenty of parts that are pure rock - and you're right, they mostly don't have forest - but most of the province is a sort of aggregate of fist-sized to man-sized rocks.

I was in Home Depot tonight and cat3 is $54 per 1k box and cat5 is $59 per 1k box. I noticed the below "1 mile" equipment below. Probably mostly hype, but maybe it could get through 200 feet of trees with some of type of antenna enhansement.

?invtid=WR1500&cat=NET?invtid=WLAN1500&cat=NET

MIMO is better.

MIMO is better with the stock antennas. The problem with long range and MIMO is the current inability to effectively add high gain antennas. If you had line of sight, 200ft would be no problem. However, even MIMO will have problems going through rocks and trees.

MIMO is also better because it survives interference and reflections somewhat better than 802.11g and much better than 802.11b. You could have a 1 mile path that would be totally reliable were it not for interference. I don't see anything in the above hardware list that would distinguish the "1 mile" router from any of the other commodity hardware.

Trees are a different story. They come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. A photo would be helpful. In general, if you can see through the trees, you send some kind of signal through. 5.6GHz seems to go through the holes somewhat better. However, 900MHz goes right through with little attentuation. Try it with a 900MHz cordless phone. I'm not sure what are your speed requirements, but you might want to look into 900MHz hardware.

However, I still think a chain saw is the right answer.