Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Greg Brown" <gwbrown1 AT gmail.com>]

Can you get an overhead shot using google maps?  That would help in determining if this could be done.  My gut feeling says, yeah, absolutely, this is possible.  I've shot a signal well over a mile using a legal combination of amplification and gain antennas.

My only question is this: do you have any window where you can get a line-of-sight to the general store?  If not things get trickier, but nothing too complicated.  I'd amp the bejeebus on the store side and use a yagi with some decent gain and I'd hook everything up with low-loss LMR-400 cable.  On the school end I'd use decent gain antenna, perhaps a yagi, perhaps a parabolic dish, it depends on the signal strength.  Then you could run WPA2 or IPSEC across the link, depends on what floats your boat.  Run everything over the least congested channel that you can (1, 6 or 11 or 14 if you want to live life on the edge a a law-breaker (I don't suggest it, really)).

Off the top of my head that's where I'd start.

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Michael Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org> wrote:

I've been tasked with getting wifi into our new school (The Riverrock School on the Haw), and on a limited budget everyone is asking me why we can't just use the wifi signal from the  Saxapahaw General Store which is in the same building given we have permission from the store owners.  The problem is this is an old textile mill, with really thick walls and floors, and we're 300 feet at least from the store directly through many walls and two floors.  Even if I could convince the people responsible for the rooms between us to put in wifi repeaters, we'd still have to get the signal through two floors and several walls, and I can't imagine that would work well.

The people renting the rooms right next to ours do have a strong wifi signal into our office, but they've refused to let us use it, so its either the General Store or our own connection.

 I had convinced my fellow parents to just pony up for a cable modem, but as with so many organizations, just after I:

1. Proposed a plan

2. Requested feedback

3. Gave notice I was buying the hardware

4. Purchased the hardware

5. Scheduled the installation with TW.

Its at this point that suddenly the issue came up again with everyone who was too busy to notice the first time.  Everyone has a story about a "guy they know" who did something amazing with wifi with some sort of booster, but the 'ol pringles can trick seems woefully inadequate here.

So, is there some obvious solution here I'm missing?  I already looked into cabling, and given the age of the mill this would be a very long and complicated cable pulling job, outside of my league at least.

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Michael Czeiszperger

Chapel Hill, NC 

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." ~G.K. Chesterton 

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