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I'm trying to set up a wireless bridge across two buildings right across the street from each other. Will this really work for me?
As described in this article: www.gnswireless.com/GNS1120A_5Ghz_Wireless_Bridge....
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davidmarshalljr's pick
I would be careful mounting those outside, since they don't have any lightning protection. I'm not sure what part of the country you are in, or how tall the buildings are etc, but if they are going to be mounted outside, get lightning suppression equipment, otherwise you will fry your internal components if lightning strikes any where near them.
Depending on how big the street is (2 lane, 4 lane, express way) you might be able to find a place inside to mount them. What may be a cheaper way to go is to get any DD-WRT capable router or access point with removable antennas and get a decent directional antenna.
I've done what you are trying to do, but I used $600+ Cisco Access Points, Aeronet 1200's I believe with a 10db gain antenna. We mounted them inside, near windows that faced each other and they worked great.
Depending on the amount and type of traffic you plan on pushing over them, you may want to look at getting some routers or layer3 switches to go behind them to help you shape and route traffic.
Depending on how big the street is (2 lane, 4 lane, express way) you might be able to find a place inside to mount them. What may be a cheaper way to go is to get any DD-WRT capable router or access point with removable antennas and get a decent directional antenna.
I've done what you are trying to do, but I used $600+ Cisco Access Points, Aeronet 1200's I believe with a 10db gain antenna. We mounted them inside, near windows that faced each other and they worked great.
Depending on the amount and type of traffic you plan on pushing over them, you may want to look at getting some routers or layer3 switches to go behind them to help you shape and route traffic.
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I have done this in the past with a linksys wap54. We had an outbuilding with one office in it on the grounds of a high school. They had been paying for a separate DSL line for that one person for a long time. I came up with the solution to use the wap54 in bridge mode.
It was about 500 or 600 feet between the buildings with a parking lot so lots of open space. I used suction cups on the mounting plate and attached them to the inside of the glass windows in each building and then used normal ethernet cable to wire up the machine in the out building and to connect the AP in the main building to the main network. Now the performance is not going to be awesome though with those designed to be directional I think you will have a better chance of getting the 54 mbs. But remember that other people working in the same band can cause interference. Also the latency on a wireless link is higher than on a wired link. This can show up if you have a bunch of machines going across the link with very chatty. Luckily our user was mostly accessing his e-mail and some web browsing. He hadn't come around to storing his files on the network server as he didn't trust it as much as his desktop.
It was about 500 or 600 feet between the buildings with a parking lot so lots of open space. I used suction cups on the mounting plate and attached them to the inside of the glass windows in each building and then used normal ethernet cable to wire up the machine in the out building and to connect the AP in the main building to the main network. Now the performance is not going to be awesome though with those designed to be directional I think you will have a better chance of getting the 54 mbs. But remember that other people working in the same band can cause interference. Also the latency on a wireless link is higher than on a wired link. This can show up if you have a bunch of machines going across the link with very chatty. Luckily our user was mostly accessing his e-mail and some web browsing. He hadn't come around to storing his files on the network server as he didn't trust it as much as his desktop.
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