Media for Marina base station coverage?

Marina base station coverage?

I'm trying to guessitimate what sort of antennae I'll need to cover an area of slips in a marina. The coverage area is about 600' wide and about 400' deep. The starting area for coverage is about 200' from the base of where the antenna would be mounted. That is, there's a dockmaster's office that's about 200' from the nearest boats that would need coverage. There's a row of lift-slip motorboats but it's not necessary for them to have coverage. If they got coverage by chance that'd be great but it's not required. Most directional antenna have a horizontal beam of about 60 degrees. That's not wide enough for things at the edges of the 200' distance to the first pier. My boat happens to be in the very center of the beam but I'd want to have a plan to cover the other boats at the edges too.

So what's typical in this sort of situation? I'm assuming it's unwise to hang two directional antennae off a single radio, correct? So I'd have to add another access point with it's own antenna, right? Or could I hang two off a single WRT54GS?

Since this is a 'donation' of sorts to get free access in the marina I'm hoping to try it using something like this antenna:

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Mainly because it can be mounted inside a window using suction cups. If it works and the level of traffic through the wireless doesn't otherwise disrupt the limited amount of traffic the existing, single desktop computer expects then other locations/antennae could be considered.

Basically, they've been dragging their feet at the marina (and some sister locations) for ages on getting WiFi working. The main location has been attempting to make it 'pay for' service and it's meeting with considerable failure. Coverage is weak and people won't pay for that. So here I've convinced the onsite manager to let us 'give it a try' provided it doesn't otherwise muck up his use of the wire, which is *extrememly* limited anyway since all office work is done at another location. Mainly just mail and web with a Citrix session. So by donating the time/effort/devices he's willing to share some bandwidth. There's no live-aboards here so it's not like it'd be much more than lightweight use. But we'd certainly be charting the consumption (gotta love MRTG) to keep things from getting out of hand.

So starting with something like that panel antenna would let us give it a try without having to mount anything permanently, at least not during this trial. But it being stuck on the window would prevent it from getting bumped out of alignment like one just placed on table might. Of course there's always the risk of getting unstuck from the glass... but that's trivial during this trial.

-Bill Kearney