[PLUG] homegrown WAP

[AthlonRob]

On Tue, 2003-11-11 at 18:51, Carla Schroder wrote:
>  Of course home is my test lab, but I'll be doing 
> installations in interesting places, like barns and tractor sheds. And 
> small businesses, which are often steel buildings with wood/drywall 
> interiors. Maybe that will add security, by trapping signals inside? :)

Something I didn't see mentioned was concrete.  It seems six inches of
concrete might as well be two feet of lead when you're dealing with
WiFi.

I helped a friend network a barn re-finished into an office for a small
company (~10 employees, I think).  Due to the nature of the building, we
decided a WiFi/10/100 hybrid setup would be best.  It turned out to be
accurate, but geeze, what a lot of work... and we went over budget.

The walls in this office were thin, like a half-inch of wood thing, with
some cement walls (it was a dairy barn) between some rooms, going up
about four feet.  We didn't think much of it at the time.  All the
computers were down low, either on the ground or a foot or two above the
ground.  As such, the LOS between many of the computers and the WAP had
a concrete wall in it.

We ended up wiring in more offices than we had originally planned.

Then came the fun stuff - running WiFi into an office in the attic 30'
away from the doorway to the attic.  We thought about wiring it, but the
area was such a high-traffic area and the floor was such we couldn't. 
The rafters went up too high to be easily reachable, too.

We ended up buying a 'pigtail' antenna, I think it was called, for that
office, since the WiFi signal was incapable of penetrating an inch of
wood and three of fiberglass insulation.

Overall, WiFi's signal degredation was far more than we had anticipated,
and it ended up eating *a lot* of my time and a decent chunk of various
folks' money.

Then compare that to home... I regularly take my laptop all over the
house, using my WAP as a base-station.  It sits on one wall of the
house.  Five feet away, I get a 85-90% signal strength.  If I go into
the 'family room' it drops down to about 65-70%.  The signal, then, has
to travel through two interior insulated walls, a mirror, and a
shower... and it drops that 15% or so.

If I take it up into the bonus room over the garage, it drops down to
only about 30%, where it goes through two exterior walls.

I guess the moral of these stories is... buy some equipment you can use
around the house, and before committing to providing a networking
solution for somebody in an odd situation, take *your* equipment out
there and make sure you're going to be able to get the signal where you
need to get it.

Have fun.  :-)

Rob