Wireless Bridging??

[dishman]

My scenario:
I have a wireless LAN with 3mbps cable internet connection.
My friend has a wireless LAN with no internet connection.
I want to share my internet connection with my friend whose house is 4 miles away direct line of sight.
I built 2 biquad antennas (28db og gain) then attached them to a pair of 30 inch dishes and plan to install them on our roofs.
What extra equipment do I need to connect our two wireless LANs.

My question is:
Should I hook up a wireless access point to one of the ports on my wireless router and then hook up the dishes pigtail to the access point and then at my friendÂ’s house should I hook up the dishes pigtail to a wireless bridge and then run the bridges port to the wan port on his wireless router? will this format work?

This is an image model of what I think may work, but I would love some conformation before I buy all of the equipment.

 

[tractorboy]

I think you asked this question in a diferent form. The access point probably will not work, unless you both have one connected to your lan port.. What you probably will need is your friend will need a router that can be put in bridge mode. Maybe just plugging his antenna into one of his lan ports, not the wan port. what have you tried ? are the antennas up yet ? 4 miles is a far distance, you may have the FCC at your doorstep, an educated guess is your are going to need a few watts to broadcast .

 

[dishman]

It is under 30db so the fcc should not have a problem. i have not tryed anything becuse i do not want to buy $200 worth of equipment until i know what will work.

 

[tractorboy]

I looks like you have been doing your homework. How far will that broadcast ? So what do you have " driving " these atennas ? in the way of an amp...or do you need an amp ? or are they replacement antennas for say a router ?

 

[tractorboy]

are you going to have an amp like this

http://www.hyperlinktech.com/web/amplifiers.php

 

[dishman]

no amp the amp would put me over the db limit and then id have the fcc knocking at my door. the dish is fed by a BiQuad antenna i built that uses a pigtail replacing the antenna on my router.

check it out:
http://www.trevormarshall.com/biquad.htm

 

[tractorboy]

Totally awesome, I can almost garauntee you are going to need an amp to drive them though, especially 4 miles. , but thats just me. Go to experts exchange and ask this same question.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/

ask in the networking section, you may have to pay to join
it would be totally awsome if you could get it to work
at this point i am not sure

 

[hilowe]

I would be tempted to go with an antenna like one of these:

http://www.hyperlinktech.com/web/hg2424g.php

This specific one is a 24 dB gain antenna. I used these at a previous job, and we always had good luck with them. They seem to last forever. You can get it with the male or female connector. We always used the female connector where I used to work.

As for the distance, I think that would work, but it will depend on what type of interference there is. Interference is not just what intereferes with line of sight, though. If there are power lines in the way, that will mess with the connection as well.

The way I've seen it worked and done it is by having Orinoco outdoor routers located at the top of grain elevators. We would connect one of these antennas to routers in seperate towns. These routers were placed at the top of grain elevators (the whole network was run the by the co-op).

Here's the website for the place I used to work. You can at least look at the towns that we served and the distances:

www.unitedwestern.net

 

[tractorboy]

what about the FCC ? and dishman might not have a grain elevator.
it sounds like it was in the country less interference, this is probably urban to metropolitain. I think dishman wants to drive what ever antenna with a pc store wireless router, and I am thinking, that a signal that will barely get across the street is not going 4 miles just because a parabolic antenna is used.

 

[hilowe]

1. We were licensed by the FCC. I wasn't involved with that, but it was my understanding that it wasn't because of the antennas we were using. We had some fairly good amps on the access points to make sure we were able to go a long distance. Our record for distance was just under 8 miles from the access point, and that wasn't using the parabolic antenna. It was using an 11 dB yagi antenna (bought from the same place).

It was also my understanding that so long as we used less then 30 dB gain antennas, we didn't need to be licensed by the FCC. Maybe I misunderstood that, and it was less than 30 dB gain total, in which case two 15 dB antennas would be the limit.

2. I doubt he has a grain elevator, also. I was just trying to tell him what my experience was, and what to watch out for, like the power lines.

3. Yes, where I worked was in the country. Unfortuneately, though, there was still a lot of interference, as the railroad went by every one of the grain elevators. The railroad used some sort of monitoring system on their trains that would sometimes play havoc with the system. I was told once by a co-employee that it was microwave, but I never checked into it.

We also had competitors that tried to mess with our signal. For example, by one of our access points, there was almost always interference. We checked the equipment, and it was fine, we changed broadcast channels, and the problem would clear up. A couple of days later, we would have interference problems again, so we changed channels, and that cleared it up. This kept happening over and over. Someone did some checking, and found a residential access point was broadcasting, and causing the interference. When we changed our broadcast channel, a couple of days later they changed theirs to the same channel.

4. I am sure dishman wants to use a pc store wireless router. If it sounded like I wanted him to go out and buy Orinoco equipment, I'm sorry. That's not what I meant. I was just trying to describe the network that I had seen and used. You would be amazed at what a pair of 24 dB gain antenna will do for distance. Unless we had an amp on it, I don't believe the Orinoco's put out much more power than a typical wireless router. We only used amps on the access point antenna, not the backbone. Measure our distances out. Every town on that website has an access point, and was a link in the backbone.

I'm sure you'll find that we had links going more than 4 miles.