wireless bridge 1000 feet. It works!

[cparker]

I'm really new to all of this, but reading the forum has been very helpful. I wanted to be able to access my lan from my other location, around 1000 feet away (line of sight, you can wave from place to place). I got two wap54g Access Points (latest version, stock firmware). Set them up as a network bridge, plugging each one into a switch at each location. Wep was set at 128 (there is no wpa using bridge mode with these boxes). I built two sets of "windsurfer" parabolic reflectors (from www.freeantennas.com") and one on each of the four antennas, two on each box. Aimed each set of antennas at the other location. Turned it one. It worked right away. But I noticed that when I transfered a large 50 mbyte file it dropped the connection. So I moved one of the access points onto a metal table rather than at the window. For some reason the metal table seemed to help and no more dropped connection. Probably is acting as a groundplane and that enhances the signal. As to speed, I can only say that it took something like 5 minutes to transmit the 50 megabyte zipped file. This is fine for what I will be doing, occasionally. There is not visual display about the quality of the connection as I get when I use a wireless adapter with drivers. Anyway, for a first pass, not unhappy. I suppose I could get one of those gain antennas and results would be better, but for now it's more than I expected. Amazing whata 30 mw will do with some stiff paper and some aluminum foil pasted together.

 

[newParadigm]

hey, if you get teh sveasoft alchemy firmware (PM me fora copy), you cna boost the power to sometthing like 250mw, should give ya lots better performance.

~new