Need suggestions for 1+ mile wifi antenna

H

havand

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 15, 2001
Messages
420
A guy i know wants to grab a wifi signal from a little over a mile away. The place he wants to put the antenna is ontop of a hill and the signal is in a vallyish thing below. I'm a bit confused about something, however. If he puts a high gain antenna on his end, does the origin need an equally powerful antenna or will the standard wireless hub antenna be able to pick up his signal and provide enough power for his antenna to pick it up. This is going to be used with a laptop, so i need to find a card that has an external antenna connector and an antenna. If you've had any experience with this or can provide suggestions for the card/antenna, please do. I'm just not sure if it'll work with only 1 end having a good antenna. Just don't know enough about wifi. Thanks.
 
If it's a laptop I heard dell makes soem nice setups...check them out or look on ebay.
And I think he's ok jsut using his high gain antena...but I could be wrong. But def check the dell wifi cards cause you can hook up a high gain antena too them.
 
both ends of the connection will need to be able to transmit and receive over that distance.
you might be able to get away with the high gain on the PC/Laptop, and then just cranking up the output on the wireless router with a hacked firmware. Or, put a high-gain/directional attention on the wireless router as well.
 
" I'm just not sure if it'll work with only 1 end having a good antenna"

At a mile, no. It definitely will not. You'll need mid gain directionals on both ends. WIth clear line of site and very little to no loss from transmission cables you could get away with 7-9 dBi yagis' on both ends. Using the default radiators on SOHO router/AP's will be useless at that distance.
 
I have a page in bookmarks on my computer a home that shows how to do wi-fi over large distances (5km+), basically it uses satellite dishes pointed at each other.
 
Alright. Thanks for the help guys. This pretty much confirms what i had thought, but i wanted to be sure before i told the guy it wouldn't work. Now i gotta come up with some otherway for him to get internet.
 
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