Hi Ken

Well if you are going to a specific location (the park) you may as well
use a directive antenna like a corner reflector/gridpack etc. In fact
you could be real smart and use a 2m handheld and a low data rate link
to swing the antenna in whatever direction you choose (eg packet talking
to a home PC, PC connected to rotator. You could even make it as simple
as a two state tone decoder for CW or CCW the antenna whilst watching
the WiFi signal) There are some quite broad reflector based designs out
there that give good gain on 2.4GHz. For example a 900x700mm gridpack
will give you about 25dBi.

I guess you are using one of the amateur radio 2.4GHz channels? You can
use a higher EIRP than the normal WiFi is limited to. (from memory 30dBm
EIRP is the legal max for unlicensed use) You do need to identify
though. (A simple text based ping might be enough)

I am surprised at the -97dBm sensitivity. The links I worked on in the
past we used -87 for 11MB 802.11b predictions. I guess your figure would
be at the lowest data rate and thus effective bandwidth. You can't beat
Boltzmann! The Ethernet microwave data radios I work with nowadays need
about 20-25dB s/n for a 50MB/sec channel that covers about 10MHz b/w.
Thermal noise in 10MHz is about -103dBm so we need better than -83 for a
good path. Our radios dont change speeds/bandwidth on the fly though.
Interference will be your greatest enemy though...

One of you other posters suggested remoting the router box to remove the
cable loss problem. It is the place where most of your problems lie.
Even moving it part the distance will help. You might also look at a
better coax. We use to use LMR400 extensively. It was much cheaper than
RG213 and lower loss as well.

Oh and be careful with the WAP etc setup as regards "maximum distance".
We had a problem early on where we left it at the default for a 10km
path and the ACKs (or something) kept crashing and kept the speed down.
The distance number introduces some kind of ACK delay..

Good luck!

Cheers Bob VK2YQA

Ken Bessler wrote:


That's great info, Bob - btw my router puts out +20dbm and the
background noise level in the receiver @ 2.422ghz is -97dbm +/-
2-3db....