Long range wireless with one curve ball

[Calumus]

I'm helping a friend set up a wireless link between his house and his office so he can drop his internet service at home. The two buildings are about 160 yards apart so I assumed running a cable was out of the question, even though that would be ideal. Cable run to the basement of the house then put in a good wireless access point for everything in the house would've been easiest. Since the distance is apparently too long we opted for a high powered wap in the attic of the office on the same side as the house. I picked up an EnGenius ecb3500 which is supposed to be a monster. I set it up as a wap and cranked the power all the way up. Now on the side of the house closest to the office I can get 1-2 bars with a usb adapter on a short extension cable so I could get line of sight. At the back of the house I get 1 bar max, and pages time out half the time. The house is a log cabin, so I'm guessing that has something to do with the lack of penetration. Anyone have any suggestions as to what I can do next? A trench with conduit is being run for other cabling so if there were some kind of amplifier I could still run cat 5 or 6 to the basement of the house and go from there; but if no suck thing exists I'm still at a loss. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[imagoon]

Wireless is two ways. Just because you blast a signal way out there doesn't mean that the other end can do the same. Get proper gear and antennas like a yagi and then you would make this work.

 

[drebo]

Proper directional higher-gain antennas in a wireless bridge setup would probably make this work. 160 yards isn't very much.

Or, trench and run fiber.

 

[Calumus]

Any idea about how much a fiber set up would run? I'd have no idea where to even begin looking, or what I'd need. Never dealt with fiber before. A trench is going in anyway. I actually just saw a youtube vid where someone did a speed test with 500' of Sewell cat5e and their performance remained about the same as on a 25' run. Set up, or is it actually possible?

 

[imagoon]

as with any out of spec cable run, "it might work" You need to test with the proper cable (outdoor burial is different) and the with the lightning attestors / protection in line.

 

[spidey07]

A 200 foot fiber patch cable and some transceivers would be under 500 bucks. If you're running cable anyway, then just run the fiber. No lightning/ground problems to deal with unless you're using direct burial cable which would increase the price.

 

[drebo]

If you're afraid of doing fiber, you could run a CAT5e cable and use some of these: http://us.startech.com/product/110VDSLEXT-10-100Mbps-VDSL-Ethernet-LAN-Extender-Kit . They work really well and are simple to set up. They're fast, too. You should be able to get them cheaper from a reseller (like Newegg or CDW).

 

[JackMDS]

Directional Antenna on each site in Windows facenig one the other.

No facing Windows? Use and weather protected outdoor Antennae.