Austad, Jay wrote: > Well, the guy that runs ingenious-nets.com(or .net, forget which) told me > that he has a 23 mile 802.11b link, using only a 24db directional on each > end, no amplifiers. After 23 miles, you start running into curvature of the > earth issues, but with an antenna that is 80 feet high, you might be able to > squeeze some more range out of it. Plus, you can toss an amp on each end > also. I have some software that can do plots of general coverage and point-to-point links. For some examples of what it can do, look at: http://fox.sector14.net/~bryan/radio/2g_coverage.jpg Warning this is a 990k jpg! This is a coverage map from my home in Apple Valley and assumes a 40 foot tall antenna on the receive end with 15db of gain in the antenna system. The different colors are signal level in dbm. A -82 dbm signal level is the minimum required for a full bandwidth connection for the Orinoco cards. http://fox.sector14.net/~bryan/radio/n0buu-ka0ztt.jpg This is a point-to-point plot from my place to a friend's place just off of 35E and Grand Ave in St. Paul. The receive sensitivity is wrong in this one but it shows that the link could possibly work but will probably be flakey because of the closeness of the hill in the middle. > > Say we did build a sweet wireless network... It's obviously going to have > multiple connections to the internet. So how do we plan on doing routing? > Do we want people to go out the nearest internet connection? Or, to get > more complicated, out the *best* internet connection? This is kind of what Andy was getting at. Hot spots would probably each have their own Internet connection while a metro wide network will probably only have a single connection to the Internet. The design of each type of system is very different. I think that it's a bit too early to try to build a metro wide network at this time. I think we should work on Hot spots for now and we can revisit the issue in a few months when we see how the group is growing. -- Bryan Halvorson bryan at edgar.sector14.net
