The www.sdwug.org community radio project at www.socalfreenet.org has expanded its range of toys recently to include a homebrew 802.11a backhaul to counter the increasing congestion on the 802.11b frequencies in our biggest community installation at www.goldenhillfreeweb.org (4 interconnected nodes with more planned).
As we build these projects, we're trying to document them well so that other community wireless groups can avoid re-inventing the wheel. In that spirit, here are some links you may find interesting: Our main page describing the <$500 backhaul is at http://socalfreenet.org/80211arelay This includes a full parts list (including some variations): http://socalfreenet.org/80211arelayparts Or, if you only want to look at pictures, you can browse around from http://socalfreenet.org/image/tid/19. Then we upgraded the plastic boxes and made the link more permanent: http://socalfreenet.org/node/view/192 More recently we've added a second backhaul (and our first double-hop): http://socalfreenet.org/node/view/215 and then spent some time tweaking it today and learning valuable newbie lessons like "always make your ethernet cables 10' longer than you think you'll need", "pay attention to primary vs secondary antenna connectors", and "for 802.11a, line of sight really means ... line of sight!": http://socalfreenet.org/node/view/216 As mentioned previously on this list, this backhaul makes heavy use of the $20 Proxim 8571 which we dismantled: http://socalfreenet.org/proxim8571. Several people are trying to hack this so they can use it directly as a client bridge. The comments on the above link are tracking that progress. Hope this provides some of the enjoyment to you reading about this as it has to us putting it all together! cheers, michael _______________________________________________ BAWUG's general wireless chat mailing list [unsubscribe] http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
