Bringing High Speed Internet to Jmbamboo

I live in the middle of 20 acres. I've always had dial-up as that was all that was available. My daughter lives at the northeast corner while my son lives near the southwest corner of the property. Terra has satellite internet which is better than dial-up but is still only 1 meg. speed. Since my daughter often works from home and her husband is a programmer both need high speed access and wanted something faster and more reliable than satellite. I had almost no experience with high speed internet. My son has almost always had broadband access so he's used to high speed. When he moved onto the farm here, one of his first priorities was to get cable access. The local cable company has a drop about 600 feet from my daughter and quoted her a price of about $4500 to run coax to her home (a portion would have to be underground). This was too expensive. When my son built his place his new driveway accessed a different road and the last cable drop was about 450 feet from house. The cable company quoted a price of about $2800 to run all the way to his home. Joshua and I figured if we could get cable to the very edge of the property (that distance would have been free) we could get it to his house ourselves. We asked the cable company if they would run to a temporary structure such as a camper as we were still building. They said yes! We borrowed a "pop up" camper from a friend and parked it at the entrance to the property, next to our first electrical pole. This was about 150 feet from the last cable access point and the cable company would run the drop for free if it was no more than that. I really had my doubts about the whole thing but the cable contractor showed up more or less on time, ran a drop to our pole and and we had 16 meg. service in the camper! So far, so good. Now we had to get the service to his home, another 300 feet. We had purchased 300 feet or RJ-6 coax cable and a kit to attach the proper connectors to the ends. We ran the cable directly thru the woods and moved the router from the camper to his house. We were concerned about excessive loss of the signal over such a long distance so we installed a 30 db amplifier. We now had 16 meg. service at his home and as far as we could tell it seemed to be a good signal. This had actually been the easy part even though it took several weeks to get to this point. We had so far spent about $200. My son had an old Linksys router and we hooked it up and had wireless internet. Now our plan was to get the signal to my house, about 600 feet from his home, across a heavily wooded valley.
I purchased a panel antenna and placed it at the source. In the picture above you can see the first antenna as a little white dot next to the red arrow. I'm standing where my antenna is now located and looking back thru the clearing toward the source. Clearing the line of sight was a gradual process and involved cutting a few trees, mostly small stuff, 3 to 6 inches in diameter. Not convinced this was going to work I was hesitant to cut any trees I didn't have to. Once we had the wifi source and a line of sight cleared I made a trip to BestBuy and came home with a plug in repeater. It did not have a removable antenna (which meant we couldn't attach a directional antenna). However, we could return it within 30 days if it didn't work so it was worth a try. Standing outside my house with my laptop I could see the signal from my son's house but it was very weak. The repeater was able to boost the signal but the best service I could get was about 1 meg. I hung it outside on a tree and for about a week I surfed at 1 to 2 meg. It was wonderful but I felt sure we could do better. The repeater was hanging in a tree outside my house, transmitting thru a nearby window. We needed the repeater to get the signal into our house as we live underground and the signal just wouldn't penetrate unless the repeater was placed near a window. I had just assumed one could buy a repeater with removable antennas but that was not the case. I read some more and it appeared we needeed a router that could be re-configured as a repeater. I needed to be able to attach an external antenna with the router inside, repeating the signal and transmitting it throughout the house via it's second antenna. How to do this? Reading different forums I kept hearing about software that could be downloaded to the router allowing me to re-configure it as a repeater. I'm no programmer by any means and I felt I was in over my head at this point. However, I could take the next step for an investment of about $60 for a new router and another $100 or so for another panel antenna and 35 feet of antenna cable. The "workhorse" router for most WiFi users seemed to be the Linksys WRT54GL. It is readily available, has removable antennas, is reasonalbly priced, and there is a tremendous amount of support out there on the web. My reading convinced me I could (maybe) download custom firmware and "flash" the router with it. There are two basic choices for this software, Tomato and DD-WRT. I found forums for both and even a Wiki for each. Tomato seemed to have the simplest inteface and from the little I knew I felt like it would do the job. It was easy to download, and fairly simple to flash the router. Before long I had logged onto the router and was reading the wiki in order to find out how to set it up as a repeater. This is where I ran into problems. The more I learned about bridges, repeaters, acess points and Tomato, the more it appeared that there was no option with Tomato to configure the routher as a simple repeater. The best i could do was set it up as a "bridged repearer". This involved using another router at the base configured in the same manner. I ordered another Linksys router, flashed it with Tomato and began the attempt to set up a bridged repeater. It was more difficult than I supposed and different articles I read didn't agree on the different steps and settings. I was becoming quite knowledgeable by this point and was very famiiar with the documentaion available on the net. I began to realize that DD-WRT was actually the bettter way to go (for me) and the Wiki had clear instrucions for setting up the router as just a repeater. I flashed both routers again with the correct version of DD-WRT (on top of the previous Tomato firmware update). This appeared to work and the interface was just as described by the Wiki. I did a hard reset on the base router in order to return it to it's original function as just a wireless router. I then went through the procedure to configure my router as a repeater. It took severel attempts, many mistakes, and a few set backs but at some point it acutally started working! Setting this up outside on top of a pole gave me 5 to 6 megs of broadband access inside my house via a 25 foot cable that came down beside the chimeny. I was so pleased with myself and surfed the web as it was meant to be. I actually watched videos for he first time! Now I had to get the signal another 400 feet to my daughter's house. The Wiki told me that setting the router as a repeater would half the bandwidth. Since I could average about 5 meg I told my daughter that the best she could hope for would be about 2 to 3 meg (after bandwidth halving along with loss over the 400 feet additional distance and 35 feet of antenna cable at her home.) She and her husband felt this would be fine as it would still be twice as fast as their satellite acess. We had proved it would work to my house and was very reliable. I ordered another router to use as the final repeater. I flashed it with dd-wrt and went throught the procedure to turn it into a repeater. It wouldn't work. I re-did everything and it still didn't work. I turned to my son in law, Tim, a programmer. The wiki suggested setting up the router as a client first, then as a repeater. This looked much more complicated but Tim did it quickly and now we had another working repeater. We hooked it temporarily thru a 15 foot cable we had, sitting the panel antenna outside on a picnic table on his high deck, aimed back toward my outside antenna. Tim used the router as an access point while Terra accessed the wireless signal for her laptop. We had service now but not very good with lots of fading and interruptions. We decided the line-of-sight needed more clearing. I cut a few more small trees and some limbs. I finally had to cut a number of Robert Young bamboo canes. These were at one end of the grove so it looked ok after we finished. With a new 5o foot cable from Cables to Go we had a permanently mounted antenna behind the deck rail. I spent a day replacing the bamboo poles at the first two points with steel pipe. I drove a larger piece of pipe in the ground and slid the new antenna poles into the pipes in the ground. The support worked well and I was able to turn the pipes to aim the panel antennas. With the new mountings the antenna were much more stable with little sway. This all helped the signal. Once we had everything completed reliablity was near 100%. About the only interruptions we have are when we lose power or if one of the grandchildren reset te router.

Installing a Wifi Network at Jmbamboo Nursery

This is where we ran the coax to and set up the first router. There is a panel antenna on a bamboo pole attached to the side of he home. In the photo below it is the little white dot with a red arrow pointing toward it. I had to cut the ends off several branches on the Maple tree on the left. This was winter/late spring. Later on I had to trim a few more limbs.

The distance is about 600 feet. I had to cut one large tree and a number of smaller ones. I kept the right of way as narrow as possible. It's difficult to see unless you stand at a particular place and look just the right direction.

Originally I set it on a fairly tall bamboo pole with a cable going to the router. I spent a lot of time at the top of that ladder, aiming the antenna and trying to optimize the exact location in order to avoid cutting as many trees as possible. I had not cleared much of a line of site clearance at this point. This made it difficult to test for reliability once I got it working. I reached the point where all the small stuff was cut and in the very middle was a large oak. Any other angle or change in location involved cutting more than one large tree. I agonized over it for several days (plus I really don't like using a chainsaw) and finally cut it. From the top of the ladder I could see the first antenna clearly now.