My 3km Wireless Network Link with Linksys APs
After years of sitting on my wallet not wanting to spend the money on any of the available outdoor 2.4Ghz or 900Mhz radios intended for long range use, I finally had a bit to drink on my birthday and started ordering stuff to setup a wireless link from my house to work so that I could get a better than 19,200bps internet connection. It turns out I couldn’t get high enough to get a stable link between my house and work due to a heck of a lot of noise in the direction of the office (and a lot of tall trees cutting down the SNR) so I gave up hope on free high speed internet access and went knocking on my closest neighbors’ doors. I found a guy willing to let me put an antenna on his garage in exchange for me paying for his cable internet.
Pictured below is the gear located at my house. It’s a 24 dBi grid antenna connected to a Linksys WRT54-GL via 10 feet of LMR-400 all mounted to the windsock tower on the far side of the runway next to my house, about 400′ away. The remote site is located on the right side at the tree line on the horizon 3km away. The link SNR is 30 dB. It runs at 54 Mbps.
Pictured below is the Linksys WRT54-GL, a Linksys 12 volt PoE adapter, an ethernet lightning protector and a 0-3Ghz coax lightning protector all mounted in a gutted Federal Pioneer disconnect box. So far the Linksys gear has had no problems with -10 degree celsius temperatures.
Cost for just the link (two radios, two antenna, two coax lightning protectors, two 10′ LMR-400 cables) was about $600 CDN. Another $700 or so was spent on 500′ of outdoor Cat5e (no problems with a 380′ ethernet segement between the Linksys WRT54-GL and a DLink Switch II 5 port switch), a pair of ethernet surge protectors, a PoE adapter, some surge protector power bars, another WRT54-GL to act as a NAT router at the remote end with the cable connection, and a pair of D-Link PowerLine HD Ethernet Adapters (BoPL adapters) to make a connection between the guy’s house with the internet connection and his garage that I attached the antenna and radio to.
1 comment April 27th, 2007
