On Wed, 9 Sep 2009, Jim Brown wrote: > I have a buddy who has a son living about a quarter mile away, and he > mounted a router in a weatherproof fiberglass box on top of his 50 ft > tower, and his son gets a good signal. Getting the router antennas up > in the clear was the answer for that system.
Kinda like AT&T did with those microwave towers on 4, 6, and 11GHz. 2.4GHz is very much line of sight stuff. I was always advised as a part of my training to confine the signal to as limited a space as I could afford to. From a network-sharing perspective, you'd be better off with a corner reflector at the top of the tower, or some form of narrow angle antenna, like a 15+ dBi dish. This confines the RF to an area around your buddy's son's house and at the same time looks like the access point is in his backyard. The advantage to this is that your router isn't off the air due to interference, and you don't have to worry about interlopers stealing your WiFi. -- Kris Kirby, KE4AHR Disinformation Analyst
