Directional WiFi Antenna

[bustaplz]

I want to set up a directional WiFi antenna to go about 150ft to a building behind my house. I do a lot of gaming and have never had great luck doing so on any wireless connection. If I were to put together a tin can antenna and point it at the building what would I need as far as an antenna to receive the signal. Could I use another router to bridge the connection to my computers or would I need to set up something different?

What kind of results can I expect as far as connection reliability and speed? Right now I have SBC Yahoo DSL(2.4MB down/400MB up) out here and Suddenlink cable inside the house(8-9MB down/800KB up) and am not looking to run cables across my back yard unless it is the only option.

Alternately, what kind of cost would I be looking at to run that length of cat5 if I do it myself? I don't have much experience running cable and the like but my dad would help me out(he has run electrical, water, sewage but never ethernet.) Would it be as simple as digging a shallow trench and just running bare cat5 or would I need to look at conduit, different cable?

 

[sdotbrucato]

If youre ttrying to do any serious gaming over this wireless, you're going to be fairly depressed.

Now as far as running copper from building to building, lets just say... not. There are plenty of threads showing the downside of doing this, but to put in short. No common ground between the buildings can/will lead to some mighty fine door stops among otherthings.

If you really want to run cable, you're going to need to run fiber from building to building.

I'll let the veterans chime in with best practices on this.

 

[bustaplz]

Well I guess I should state that I have in fact tossed a 150ft cable across the yard when I had a few friends come into town to LAN. I had no problems other than almost ruining my cable because I just had it coming in the back door. Now I'm just wondering about my options for a permanent solution.

If you need more information(distance between) let me know and I'll grab some rope and a tape measure!