Free stuff (UK) again

From: Rob O'Donnell <classiccmp.org_at_irrelevant.fsnet.co.uk>
Date: Fri Jul 9 01:57:52 2004

At 21:21 08/07/2004, Pete Turnbull wrote:

>On Jul 8, 14:01, Rob O'Donnell wrote:
>
> > Most dodgy connection I know of was put in at a customer ages back..
>they
> > had two separate units on an industrial estate. Line of sight,
>barely,
> > from back of one, to front of the other, but about 200M distance,
>with
> > other units and a road and car-park in the way.
>
>You should actually get quite decent results -- much better than
>128kbps ISDN -- at that range with even a cheap and cheerful
>directional antenna on the AP. You can make most APs work in bridge
>mode (which is what you want for point to point), and a cheap AP would
>only cost ?60-?100; you can also get cards that can be connected to an
>external antenna.


Oh when it was working, it was fine, and certainly a lot faster than the
ISDN. Problem was, we'd never done any wireless before, I was given the
job as: "go there now to fit it; best go pc world for the bits as we've not
got any". and not having had a chance to look into it and source some
decent kit, all I could find in locally available retail stores was some
cheap Belkin access point that wouldn't work in bridge mode (at least, I
couldn't get it to, at the time.) And certainly no directional antennas to
be seen!

The "line of sight" was also very tight ... imagine: (*=wireless)

          .-----
         *| unit
          |__
          |__
          |
          `---
   == road ==
-------.
     ___|
     ___|
unit __|*
        |
-------'

If you extended the back of one unit, and the front of the other, was about
1/2 meter gap. All walls were sheet metal clad. (couldn't get ANY signal
with the A/P inside and me with the laptop outside 1 meter away from it.)

I imagine there were lots of reflections and suchlike as the signal
travelled alongside these walls..
Received on Fri Jul 09 2004 - 01:57:52 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:36:50 BST