I'm trying to get a signal from my buddies place (green X) to my new place (red X). He has cable and I'm stuck with crappy 3Mbps DSL. Anyway, what would work best? Homemade parabolic antenna? Can I buy something online that will work? Whats the least expensive solution? Thanks in advance.
I would get a pair of old DirectTV dishes and a double biquad for each. If you don't want to make anything, go to the link below. There you can buy a double biquad with a wifi antenna jack, and he will even set it up to mount to the dish for a small fee. As for the dishes themselves, you can get these for cheap/free from various sources. http://www.inmanselectronics.com/double_biquad_wifi_antenna-p-1.html Then the only issue is aiming...but that should not be too difficult if you have a good compass (or two). Also, it appears that you have numerous houses between the two points. For best results, the antennas should be elevated to avoid the houses; if you can put them in a place where there is a clear line of site, this would be best...otherwise, just try to line them up for minimal blockage. At the very least, put them high enough that large trucks will not block the signal when they drive by...as a semi truck trailer will block the signal bad.
There is no trees or anything in the way. I can clearly see his roof from mine. I have two old Directv dishes. Will that work? Do you have a link to a guide. I do most my own tv repairs and console mods etc so I can follow a step by step competently.
Ok so I have two old school single LNB directv sat dishes. I've found a great spot on top of both our houses that has clear line of sight. Can you recommend a good set of routers to use for this?
check out ubnt.com I am running some of their long range equiptment. It seems to work good. speed - reliability - cost Choose two
Sorry for not getting back to you... I would probably use the WRT54GL if I were doing it. I had a link to a guide for making a double-biquad that I used to make mine out of $8 worth of stuff from home depot...but that page got taken down due to the fact that someone didn't pay the hosting bills. The hardest two parts of making it were: 1.) Soldering thick copper wire to a copper pipe (only because I did not have any fuel left in my torch). 2.) Bending the double biquad so that it was relativly flat, yet no crossovers were touching. If you are up for building it, here is a basic guide. The only difference I made to this design was to replace the flat copper reflector with a piece of steal that was bent so that it had 30mm high lips on the two long sides: http://martybugs.net/wireless/biquad/double.cgi
I got one of my double biquads built and did some testing. I was able to pick up some pretty far away access points by just aiming and scanning. So what is the best set up at this point? Do I need to set up another double biquad at his house? Can I just point to his access point? Do I need to run mine to a router and then to my other router? What does the setup look like?
Try pointing it as is; if it works, then you are set...if it does not, you can try putting it in front of a dish...it should work like that, with just one doublebiquad and one dish...I just don't know how fast it will be, or how well it will work in bad weather.
Well, I got one double bi quad attached to an old directv dish built. I got up on my roof and started pointing it around looking for access points. Didn't see any home access points but I sure got strong signals from all the wireless internet providers towers spread out accross the city. Lot of good that does me though. I guess I'm going to have to build another one for the other house. Bummer.
Before you go through all that bother, you might consider asking your friend to move his WiFi router close to a window facing your house...something tiny like that might make the difference.
Success! After switching from Qwest DSL to Clear and hating the holy living s@!% out of it, I found myself motivated to finish the other antenna. I found another router online for cheap and BAM! I have Comcast @ 50Mbs now! I am still tweaking the signal and running cable so I haven't had a chance to really play with it and do some real speed testing or anything but I'm stoked that it's working!
I spoke too soon. So after finishing all the wiring and then trying I only get around 8-15% signal strenght When I tested it was much better but there was a wireless router sitting on the roof right next to antenna so I was probably connecting to that. Now I have the routers all set up in each house with coax cable running to the two antennas on the roof. Very, very slow. I can connect and browse the web but its only about 3Mbps instead of 50Mbps. So it looks like I'm going to have to talk to these guys and get some real equipment. www.ubnt.com
Ok so I finally saved up and ordered two Ubiquiti Nanostation M5's Apparently these things will do the trick. I know this is an old thread but I'll install and then report back. 100Mbps Comcast here I come!
Wooooo hooooo! These Nanostations rock! It was a breeze to set up and it works really well. The total cost was $180.00 before shipping. I highly recommend these things. No need to buy any special routers or anything. They work with whatever routers you are already using.
Ok so its been about 5 days since I set these up and I just wanted to report back that they still kick ass! They have 250Mbps speed!
