Wireless Link House to House - Page 2

That's about as bad as having a road!

Wired is definitely preferred. I'm planning on running a conduit (or at the very least 2 hard lines) between the barn and the house once we get our house built. I probably won't use it for ethernet, but I will for phone and security. I'll have to pass under a single-lane blacktop road/driveway, but that's manageable. Crossing a county road, or a creek... I'd probably opt for wireless, for a lot of reasons. Cheaper, easier, less likely to be catastrophically interrupted by someone else, etc.

a friend of mine and I experimented with the same sort of setup with the goal of getting a link to go over a half mile. I played around with a few antenna designs such as the pringles can mod. That worked well enough to get a link at about 600ft with the router in the basement. Since then i have purchased a large parabolic grid antenna. Its about 2 ft across. I bought it off ebay for about $50. I turned the transmit power on my modded wrt54g up to 251 milliwatts. I haven't played with it a lot yet, but i can get a reliable connection to my neighbors house about 1000ft away with that. Connection speed only ever gets to around 24Mb/s. That is perfectly fine for internet usage and streaming dvds. Im not sure how it would work with blurays though.
As far as running cable that far.. yes it would be a PITA. and im pretty sure ethernet spec maxes out the cable length somewhere around 300ft, so you'd probably get lots of packet loss without a repeater in the line somewhere.

The router on the other end of the link is in the basement. its just a cheapo Belkin router, no extra antennas or anthing. On my end i have my router on the main floor connected to the antenna with about a 6ft cable. I have also moved it upstairs a few times for some testing to get over tree lines and did see slightly better performance then. The antenna i have is VERY directional too. Moving it just a few degrees really impacts the signal strength.

I would definitely consider getting some larger, perhaps powered antennas for the router/wap. That would probably make a big difference.

Something like the yagi linked below would work fine. I bridge 1000 ft with only 6 dbi antennae very easily with enterprise grade AP's, so this higher gain antenna should ensure the WRT has enough power to di what you need. You don't have to use this exact one. Just get a 10 dbi or better antenna with RP-TNC connectors. You will want to have the WRT near the exterior wall that you will be mounting the antenna on. Then just get a low-loss cable to connect the AP and the antenna.

http://www.tessco.com/products/displ...48&eventPage=1