Advice on building high-power rural wifi access point

Hello, I'm visiting my parents who live in the middle of nowhere. When I was still living with them I convinced them to buy a Hughes internet satellite dish, which provides them with some high latency broadband. My dad has an old Motorola two-way radio antenna which reaches at least two stories into the air. We live in a sparsely populated, but relatively flat part of Arkansas, where mostly just my relatives live. In the interest of bringing this faster than dial-up (we can only connect at 28kbps due to bad phone lines that will never be repaired at this rate) to the rest of my family members who live nearby. I'd need it to transmit at least a mile away.

So my question: What's the highest strength 802.11 b-g transmitter I can buy, and is it possible to use my dad's existing radio antenna, or at least the pole it's mounted on.

I'm interested in this idea, because if it's viable, then my family members can all pool their resources and potentially buy a second satellite dish which I could traffic merge with the current equipment to potentially cut the page load times.

Reply to
BikePilgrim
Loading thread data ...

Wrong model...you want the AP that can be throttled DOWN in power.

The maximum effective radiated power for a Point-to-Multipoint is 4 watts. Therefore you can use a 4 watt transmitter feeding a zero dB gain antenna - which means you'll have zero dB gain for the receiver.

But if you use a 13 dB gain antenna with your AP backed down to only

200 mW, you'll have 13 dB gain for the receive side.
Reply to
nevtxjustin

BikePilgrim hath wroth:

Google Maps and Google Earth can't seem to find Nowhere, Arkansas.

If there are no other alternatives, satellite will suffice.

Have you looked into buying a T1 line with ISP service and sharing the cost? It's expensive, but if you can get perhaps 10 houses involved in sharing the cost, it's tolerable. How far away is the nearest civilization where you can order a T1, cable, DSL, and all the latest acronyms?

Wrong question. Very high power is not a good guarantee of range or reliability. All it does it make your transmitter heard over a wider area. However, the receiver isn't going to hear any farther because the other end is still running a low power xmitter. The only way to make that work is to raise the power at both ends of the link.

There are some companies that seem to sell "high power" equipment, which these days seems to mean anything with 250mw or above. Senao and Ubiquity come to mind.

I think you should look into how to combine two internet connections. It doesn't just magically combine downloads into one stream. The most common way is to use a "load balancing router" and let it distribute the load.

If you're downloading from a single site, it will still go at the speed of a single connection. However, if you simultaneously download from a different site, it will use the other connection and you will get the combined download speeds. I think you might find it more useful to get the bigger HughesNet antenna, and just pay for the faster service.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

You may want to read some magazines like HF and Popular Computing, if you can find back-issues at a library for instance, as they cover this sort of situation in-depth with step-by-step design & build.

"Strength" of your transmitter is only part of the equation; you need low-noise signal amplification and possibly electronic-noise filtering so that you can receive your neighbor's signals at your antenna. You may want to look at building a cheap signal-repeater / transponder for each home, with these boosting the signal strength to-and-from the network's central access point, you can get a much more distributed system without as many null-signal points in your coverage area.

Makes sense. This is not uncommon, you know, even here in the U.S., never mind areas in Africa where this sort of implementation is the normal route to internet access, and there are a number of articles and even books already published on this subject.

Reply to
dg

and for interactive use, the satellite delay may dominate the effective performance

ie 2 links will not reduce the speed of light up to orbit and back.....

Reply to
stephen

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.