My suggestion is to find a suitable location for a bridge device that is central to all areas requiring coverage taking into account signal loss through walls. This would ideally be outdoors so the device would need to be weatherproof. I am currently using a Ubiquiti Networks Bullet M2 coupled with an 6dB gain omnidirectional outdoor antenna. The device connects wirelessly into my home network and retransmits the signal as well. It also transparently passes the home network ESSID through to the bridged location. The Bullet is powered through a Power Over Ethernet (POE) connection and can also receive the signal via its ethernet connection. I had originally thought I might need 2 Bullets back to back but it seems this may not be the case as my temporary arrangement seems to be working as I envisaged.
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I am just testing concepts at this stage but intend ultimately to use a
25 dB grid array antenna for extreme directionality. I need to bridge the 50+ kilometres between my two houses.
The bullet can be fitted directly to whatever antenna you find suitable and, as another poster suggests, a flat panel might provide you with a better radiation pattern.
Note also that the Bullet M2 can transmit from 10 milliwatts to 1,000 milliwatts. Power output can be varied to suit the legal requirements in your locale.
Can someone let me know the latest in getting a house, guest house and the outdoor areas set-up for Wi-Fi? I can't imagine a state of the art wireless N covering major areas. Repeaters seem to be questionable. Is the a way to completely ring in an area both indoors and outdoors?
Nope. No numbers to work with. How far? How fast do you need (i.e. video)? Any potential interference problems? Going through walls, trees, or windows? Connections to roving laptops?
802.11n (MIMO) is all about speed, not range. Getting an "N" router and client radio will NOT improve range much.
Repeaters work under some situations. I don't think your layour would work too well. The problem is that you have at least twice as many packet flying around with a repeater. That slows things down, causes some collisions, adds to the interfence, etc.
Ummm... not a great idea. A decent high gain omni antenna will have a rather narrow vertical radiation pattern. Put that on top of a tall tower and you end up with great coverage at the horizon, and very little RF going down under the antenna. If you're going to do a tower, think about sector (panel) antennas with downtilt.
It won't necessarily improve range at the lowest data rates, although having more than two transmit and receive streams at each end may help one get lucky and make a connection where a single stream with antenna diversity does not.
802.11n will help maintain a faster connection over a greater range--that second (or third) stream, even at a low rate, will aggregate.
WDS might help, but it divides the available bandwidth. It might work to have a couple of point-to-point links as a backbone, and local 802.11n nodes for coverage.
Think about it. If you're going for maximum range, the tendency is to also run the AP at the slowest speed. Slow means best signal to noise ratio, which results in the best range (assuming no interference). In general, if you have range problems, you'll end up with non-MIMO speeds and protocol.
On the other foot, the 802.11n committee did quite a bit to maximize range at MIMO speeds. Basically, it uses the available bandwidth more efficiently thus allowing *SLOWER* over the air data rates for the same desired thruput. That results in some S/N ratio improvements, but they're not huge. Spatial diversity also offers some additional immunity to frequency selective fading and multipath.
Even so, the bottom line is still the same. If you want range, you're going to have to go slow.
True in a highly reflective environment such as indoors. Not true for an outdoor point to point link, where both ends of the link follow exactly the same path. MIMO only works if you have different (length) paths between the client and wireless AP.
The problem here is that there's zero information about the layout, topology, environment, or available equipment required. All I know is that it's "wide area" and "outdoor". To me, that means directional antennas and long range, which means forget about using MIMO. Note that there are no commercial MIMO high gain antennas (yet). Similarly, there are few access points with coax connectors and removable MIMO antennas. The reason is simple, directional MIMO doesn't work.
Sure. However, that's not true in the most common MIMO situation, the laptop and USB dongle. These are now coming with single stream 1x1 MIMO which (in my never humble opinion) is not MIMO. However, the keepers of the Wi-Fi trademark disagree:
So, the sticker may say MIMO, but with only a single stream, there isn't going to be much of an improvement over 802.11g.
Yep. Think of WDS (wireless distribution service) as just a more efficient store and forward repeater.
Maybe. I've had zero luck with WDS when the clients can hear more than one access point in the WDS network. By necessity, all the WDS nodes have to be on the same channel, making self interference the major problem. If you need a demonstration, setup a WDS network with all the AP's in the same room. Good luck trying to get any throughput.
Thanks. I hadn't seen that abomination. It seems to be a polarization diversity contrivance intended to connect to a MIMO access point (or bridge). That actually will work, sorta. If one path between endpoints is right hand circular polarization, and the other is left hand, they are sufficiently well isolated to be considered seperate paths. So, you'll get at least 2x2 MIMO for a wireless bridge. However, the third vertically polarized element is a waste of effort. It will be picked up by both the RH and LH CP antennas, and has exactly the same path length as the CP antennas, and is therefore more a source of interference than a usable path. There will be a -3dB loss due to different polarizations, but that's negligible. However, I'm wondering if it can be made to work by simply inserting a small delay in the 3rd vertically polarized element.
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