Well the downside is that I dont think I can pull off the reflector senerio
or complete line of site going over the tree's. At the end of this
powerline is someone else's lot so I can't place anything on or around that.
I only have permission to put the unit in the building located behind
someone's house. Ideally I would rather not have any external antenna's on
the building if at all possible to make the intrusion on property as light
as possible. Thats what brought me to my question. The building is just an
old cheap yard shed more than anything. It has power and 2 windows on the
back side facing the back of the lot. I hope to be able to place the
wireless unit close to the window which should help push the signal. If the
building was another 25-30 foot more to the right I might would have LOS to
it but that is also when you cross over onto someone elses land which is not
an option. As for seeing the signal I am almost completely positive the
grid antenna would be able to intersect the wireless signal at the end of
the powerline but I am unsure if that is enough to get the signal back?

To see a very rough layout of what I am refering to see this
http://home.triad.rr.com/tempdir/images/layout.jpg


"Bob Bob" wrote in message
...
Hi Bryan

I'd try and model this for you but the s/w I use is broken at the moment.

You can calculate path loss over an LOS path fairly easily. If you start
with the RF output in dBm, add antenna gains, subtract the path and cable
losses you'll get a close result. This can then be applied against the
receiver sensitivity (I use to use -87dBm for 802.11 links) If you want to
model in the existence of a reflector or (say) back to back yagi you do it
is two paths using the received power at the reflecting device as the
source power for the next minus about 3dB. The results tend to be less
than encouraging in most places but it depends on the application. One
study I did (for example) was to get a 410MHz signal into a railway
cutting on the edge of a mountain. (ie no source of reflection from the
other side) The 25W TX was about 2km away and we modeled two back to back
13dBi antennas. With -82dBm as the lowest specd RX signal we only got
about 300m range from the reflecting array.

Freds suggestion of using a billboard is however a good one and simple to
experiment with. I also agree that the powerline wont be much help.

Pls tell us how it works out!

Cheers Bob VK2YQA

Bryan Martin wrote:
I am attempting to setup a 802.11b bridge between my location (siteA)
down
the powerlines but off to the right NLOS (siteB) roughly 1 mile away.