Creating a 10km wireless bridge...pointers?

[Ian Smith]

On Sun, 22 Mar 2009, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
 > > Best encrypted, or at least use point-to-point adhoc in bridge mode
 > > rather than point-to-AP unencrypted, which will surely get abused.
 > 
 > quite available in Poland where people have unencrypted AP's at home.
 > good antenna and you get free (and anonymous ;) access to the net.

My point exactly :)

 > > easily.  With +15dBm antennae you should get (at least lower) 11g rates,
 > > and if you can afford 20+dBm dish grid antennae, so much the faster.
 > 
 > grid antennas for 2.4Ghz are not expensive. give best available there are
 > about 24dB, to have LARGE margin for noise.

It's a few years since I priced some of those, they're likely much 
cheaper now.  Then something like AU$200 + coax + fittings per end.

 > > As others have said - avoid amplifiers, spend most on good antennae and
 > 
 > amplifiers make sense ONLY when there are something on the line that damps
 > the signal (like few trees) and you can't avoid that. but still it's not
 > good, snow would fall on trees and then nothing will help.

There's good discussion of that and fresnel zones etc in that WNDW book.

BTW, I've since explored a bit and found what looks like a very useful 
companion (free, PDF) book "How to Accelerate Your Internet" that I've 
yet to read beyond the table of contents getting my attention, and a 
quick browse to scope the Traffic Shaping section.  http://bwmo.net/

Very timely for me anyway; I have to tackle some Debian boxes in coming 
weeks, doing a crash course in iptables re both firewall and shaping.

cheers, Ian