non-certificated amplifier was being used to push about 5 watts out
through an omnidirectional antenna, which is rather more than the
FCC's Part 15 ERP rules for WiFi will allow.

That's like a 2m repeater being an alligator, unless that setup had a
good preamp on receive.

In practice, people using simple, commercially-provided "gain"
antennas with their commercial access points are probably safe
(especially if they buy the AP and antenna from the same vendor, as a
package which has been tested as a system).

That's basically what I have, except I needed a longer coax cable
between the wifi board in the computer to the directional antenna from
Hawking. And nobody around here sells the damm extension cables
anymore. But that won't stop a ham....

There's also a ham band that shares part of the wifi band, so we
could conceivably run high gain high power ham to ham using wifi based
equipment.


This does seem to be legal, as long as you're licensed, limit your
hopped-up transmissions to the small part of the WiFi band which
intersects the ham 13 cm band, and honor the ham-radio usage rules in
re ID'ing properly, no encryption for the purpose of concealing or
obscuring the transmission (which probably means no SSL), and no use
for purposes in which you have a significant financial interest.

I haven't checked, but if you have all security features disabled (WEP
and such) and name your computer wifi setup (peer to peer mode) with
your callsign, that might be all you need to do for ID, as wifi is a
widely recognized RF standard, like packet radio.

Also no pecuniary interest material, and no indecent material.