Matt,I'm a newby to the wirless world. I've recently converted my Cat5 house to 802.11, but I'm still using a creeping 56k dial-up connection. My neighbor (across the cul-de-sac, about 200 ft. away) has high-speed cable access and wants to try a wirless connection with me so we can split the cost each month. What do I need to make this happen? If we get him a router and each of us has a bridge, will that work? Do I need directional antenas? Thanks in advance for any help!!
-Matt
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Personally, if it's only 200 feet I'd break out the shovel and bury some cat5 in PVC pipe. But, if that's not your thing, or not possible then wireless bridging would indeed be the next best thing. Linksys makes the WET11 which is very easy to set up and has the added bonus of allowing you to install a higher power prism 2 based card in it if you ever wanted to achieve greater distances. If you have a couple of old PCs laying around, you could probably build some bridges for less than the cost of a pair of the Linksys devices.
If you are only 200' away, then you will not need directional antennas. The stock antenna which comes with your bridge should be more than adequate to achieve this distance. I believe the WET11 uses a Reverse SMA connector for its' antenna, if for some reason you do have problems using the stock antennas.
If your neighbor doesn't already have a router of some sort, the best thing for the two of you would probably be to get a 4 port wireless router for him and a bridge for you. You should be able to use your bridge as a client to his router and link the two LANs that way.
HTH, Fred
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