My neighbor at our lake house has a satellite internet setup. I told him that I would share the monthly cost if I was able to get an acceptable signal.
Using an Orinoco card, Buffalo Air Station antenna, and Network Stumbler we were able to get a signal that varied from "excellent" to "no signal". He is currently using WEP for security. If we switch to WPA, would it have any effect on signal strength?
We are going to install two "dish" antennas that have a stronger db gain to see if the signal can be improved to an acceptable level.
Can we feed the signal into a wireless router at my house so that I will not have to run cables? If so, where can I find out how to do this?
Yes -- client bridge from your neighbor connected by Ethernet to wireless access point for your own computers. Make sure they are on different non-overlapping channels (1, 6, 11), with different SSIDs.
This is not accurate. Sattelite has poor latency which is an issue for games and similar, and poor upload speed which is an issue if you plan to use P2P or stream media out. Otherwise it can be perfectl acceptable.
No, signal strength isn't affected by encryption.
Sure. You'd need two APs in your house, one in client mode and the other in normal AP mode. I guess you'd need different channels for the two. The 'client mode' one would connect to your friend's AP. The other would be your in-house AP.
Some APs can be both client and server, but the price you pay for that is a 50% reduction in speed. This may not matter for you as the speed is still likely to be much better than your sattelite uplink speed. Mark McIntyre
Not at all. The 2-way satellite systems are slightly better than dial-up. I'm using one at this moment, in exactly the way George is suggesting. If you want to download 5 or 10 MB, or even 100MB, they're vastly better, but latency makes ordinary browsing much like using a 56Kb phone line. If you get up over 100MB you tend to run into "Fair Access Plans", which means they'll throttle your download speed.
No.
Probably. I use a 14dbi dish (about 1' diameter) at my house. I got it from
formatting link
It's on a 10' pigtail into a Linksys router. At the other end, the Linksys router is just sitting in the window - no external antennas at all, and I get the full 54Mbps signal rate.
You certainly can - again, I do it - but it's not guaranteed to work. I was told my configuration wouldn't :-) My Linksys WRT54G (V3.x) routers are set up with Sveasoft Talisman firmware. The one at my house is in WDS mode, and one antenna (external) points at the base router, the other antenna distributes the signal in my house. They're not _designed_ to work this way, but it seems probable that it will work with any dual-antenna WDS router, as the antenna seems to lock to the strongest signal, and wireless devices inside my house will always lock to the omni- antenna, and the router-router connection will always lock to the directional antenna.
It may be possible with other hardware, but this is the only configuration I know.
I shouldn't think so, though it may be possible with _other_ third party firmware. The big problem is that you can't use the WDS solution with two randomly selected routers, so Mark's solution - putting a wireless client and an AP back-to-back at your place, may be just as cheap for you anyway.
That's what I did - I put the router in the neighbour's window and installed the external antenna here, and when it turned out to be perfectly adequate for my needs, I scrapped the plan to put an antenna on her house.
You really may need to consider cutting trees. 300' is practically nothing. Since my place is off-grid, and even a linksys router is an electrical load I don't want to use full-time, I sometimes use my laptop connected directly to the router in the other house, 1000' away. I only get 2-11Mbps that way, but that's still faster than the Internet connection. However, except for windows and a couple of small branches there are no other obstacles between us. Trees are definitely your major problem here.
Thanks Derek and Charlie. I looked over the links in your reply Charlie and it seems fairly simple to make an antenna using an old DirecTv dish I have.
Derek, I went ahead and purchased a L>> mlsteen1 wrote:
Odd as it sounds, check walmart.. They have a bunch of version 1's for $49.84...... Not too good for a new install, but great if you want to upgrade the firmware!
I found a WRT54GS Verison 2 at Radio Shack and loaded Sveasoft Talisman on it. I am now trying to figure out how to use the single router to both receive and send the signal over a wireless network at my house.
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