I hope u can help. I live out in the boonies, and have 'dial
up', about 5 miles from my qth is a I-35 rest area with 'wireless'.
I have been told, the 'wireless' extends two or three miles in both
directions. Where do I post a question about trying to excess this
wireless service???? thanks in advance. cl73

Do a search for "hotspots" maybe?

Take your laptop etc down there and see what the SSID is for the
service. It may indicate who it belongs to...

If you have LOS to the site and can arrange a high gain directive
antenna (eg yagi/disk) then you might just get connected!

Found an article about Sprint having provided a hotspot near Devine;

http://www.bbwexchange.com/pubs/2007...369-567277.asp

Note that this isn't the open 802.11x variety but their own $ network.

You can also try this search engine but I don't know how accurate the
results are.

http://www.jiwire.com/search-hotspot-locations.htm

Good luck!

Cheers Bob W5/VK2YQA East Texas

kc5cqa wrote:

I hope u can help. I live out in the boonies, and have 'dial
up', about 5 miles from my qth is a I-35 rest area with 'wireless'.
I have been told, the 'wireless' extends two or three miles in both
directions. Where do I post a question about trying to excess this
wireless service???? thanks in advance. cl73

if its open/unsecured, then not too much of a problem.

you will need a high gain yagi type antenna pointed at the site in question
and you *will* need some microwave low loss coax cable to feed it to a
wireless network device on your machine. That cable will probably be the
most expensive part of yoursetup..

one way to overcome loss in the cable would be to use a "wireless range
extender" with removable antennas. you could effectively use it as a line
repeater (mind you, this device isn't cheap either (about $200.00)).

you can google for wireless+internet+range+extender+antenna and see what
pops up.

kc5cqa wrote:

I hope u can help. I live out in the boonies, and have 'dial
up', about 5 miles from my qth is a I-35 rest area with 'wireless'.
I have been told, the 'wireless' extends two or three miles in both
directions. Where do I post a question about trying to excess this
wireless service???? thanks in advance. cl73

"kc5cqa" wrote in message
...
I hope u can help. I live out in the boonies, and have 'dial
up', about 5 miles from my qth is a I-35 rest area with 'wireless'.
I have been told, the 'wireless' extends two or three miles in both
directions. Where do I post a question about trying to excess this
wireless service???? thanks in advance. cl73

Hi Charles

Five miles is a long way for a WiFi link up. My suggestion is for you to
not spend any money on this "link up" till you are sure the parts you buy
*will* produce a good connection to the 'wireless' site.
If this was my project, I'd be looking for a 10 foot satellite TV dish
that I could mount to look at the wireless site which will be line of sight,
of course.
I am pretty sure that, if you do get your system to work, you will have a
wireless Bridge at the antenna so it connects to your computer via CAT 5
cable, not coax.

Jerry

A cheap solution for the cable loss issue is to buy a USB wireless
device and then run whatever length of "lower frequency" cable to that.
I have even seen articles with these devices stuck inside parabolic and
corner reflectors. About USD40-USD50 new from memory. (for just the USB
device)

You can of course also mount a wireless bridge up on the tower and run
CAT5 to it...

Cheers Bob VK2YQA

FUBAR wrote:
you will need a high gain yagi type antenna pointed at the site in question
and you *will* need some microwave low loss coax cable to feed it to a