Best wireless card for external antenna

I presume you have permission to do this from the employer.

That will take a major miracle. 2.4GHz does not like obstructions. It really depends on from what the roofs are made. If they're extremely thin shake or shingle, it just might work. Dry wood is fairly opaque to 2.4GHz. However, if it's composition shingle, concrete, rock, or something that will block RF, forget it.

It takes two to tango. If the access point at your employers establishment uses the stock rubber ducky antenna, and is located in a inside office, you don't have a change. Such antennas on access points allegedly have 300ft range, but that's under totally ideal conditions (including no interference). You're trying to go 5 times as far, and through several obstructions. Basically, it's not going to happen unless you have a directional antenna at both ends, and your employer cooperates by installing either a 2nd access point on the roof, or re-locates the existing access point some place that's conveninient for your wireless link.

Lacking any useful models and numbers, I can't do the antenna calcs for you. See:

try running the link calculations. Figure on a very optimistic 10 loss going through each roof. Aim for 20dB fade margin. If you have problems, post your calcs and equipment list, and I'll see what can be done.

Probably not enough gain.

Ummm.... LMR-400 has a loss of 7.8dB/100ft. 25ft has a loss of

2.0dB. Add 0.5dB of loss for each connector pair, for a loss of 3dB or half your power lost in the coax.

Sorry, not familiar with this device. What you shoudl be looking for is a wireless client bridge or game adapter that allows an external antenna. The radio should be mounted in the attic along with the antenna (which will probably need to be a big dish antenna). That will eliminate the coax cable loss. Setup some kind of power over ethernet system to run the radio. My current favorite is either a Linksys WET54G or WRT54G running DD-WRT firmware.

True. There are CAT5 lightning arrestors. Most cost more than the wireless bridge. See thread: |

You want to use something like the Buffalo WLI-TX4-G54HP, see "

" You want this mounted in a weatherproof box, outside, as close to the antenna as possible. You will run power and CAT5 cable to the box. You cannot run an antenna from a PCI wireless adapter to an antenna far from the card, as you'll lose too much signal in the antenna cable.

Of course even will all this, it probably won't work, unless the other side has a similar antenna set-up, and even then it's iffy.

Thanks for your answers. I better forget the 25 ft antenna cable. I like the idea of running the ethernet up near the antenna and converting it to wireless and just using a short antenna cable. I think I'll try the Buffalo Ethernet Converter that SMS suggested.

Jeff may be right about the attic not going to work. If not I will mount an antenna on the roof. 6 ft. above will give me a LOS to the window where the AP is located.

I forgot to mention that I can connect with a laptop from a few places in the attic if it's not raining. Signal is very poor but it's there, and I can log on to the network.

Thank you for your suggestions.

On 20 Jun 2006 13:18:38 -0700, "time4me2write" wrote in :

Then a directional antenna in the same location will probably work.

SMS,

I'm a little confused about what connecter type there should be on the antenna cable for mounting it on the Buffalo ethernet adapter?

Could you please tell me this?

Thank you in advance.