I'm looking at doing a similar thing where I live, I can't offer much advice to specific situations but you can read what I'm planning on doing if it helps make some sense reading over someone elses case study.

A battery more suited like those sealed lead acid panasonics DSE sell are better. They are deep cycle batteries not surface charge batterys like hevy bulky car batteries. You'd need something to provide 2-3 times more charge than draw. IE: draw 2-3Amps, panel 6-9amps, simply incase it's cloudy, plus you will want to recharge the battery during the day for the increasing night haul now that we're out of daylight savings.

As far as finding somewhere to put a repeater, all my sites in commercial radio broadcasting I've used are leased on someone elses mast somewhere, or on top of a residence I knew at the time or local garage etc... You could always talk to local council authorities enquiring about a peice of land but that's to expensive.

I would suggest for best performance to add a power amplifier to the mix, like the 500mW 2.4GHz boosters you guys at DSE are now selling for $297, at trade that's cheaper than Borg Wi-Fi are currently doing them (staff discount should give you more?).

This is the two cases I've planned I'm looking at adopting for my own sitiation with wi-fi where I live wiht two access point sites:

1>

Main access site (located on personal residence)
x2 access points. *1st - public access point channel 01 boosted to 500mW (17dBm transmit gain/10dBm receive gain) in to a 3-4dBi omni-directional antenna for public (ERIP 1000mW, that would cover 3,000 people here if they used a booster aswell). *2nd - private access point standard 30mW output channel 07 in to 20dBi high-gain parabolic directional narrow beam antenna for link to secondary private access point (remote site) on seperate channel (2000mW ERIP). Mains power available and mounted away from my house as I don't like radiation full stop, on the property boundries up a pole to the limit the local laws allow, here it's 7m's long if attached to the house, 13m long if it's standing alone before resource consent is required.

Secondary access site (located on business building in town for a few beers and self powered). x2 access points *1st - private access point standard 30mW output in to 23dBi high-gain parabolic directional antenna for link to primary access point site as a client on channel 07. *2nd - public access point channel 02 boosted to 500mW (17dBm transmit gain/10dBm receive gain) in to a 3-4dBi omni-directional antenna for public (ERIP 1000mW, that would cover 3,000 people here if they used a booster aswell). 30Amp deep cycle panasonic etc... capable of 6-9Amp charge, seald lead acid battery with voltage regulator and 6-9Amp panel array. Draw design of around 2-3Amps per hour. (effectively providing 2-3amp charge per hour over 2-3 amp draw).

This case shows 2 public access points on their own channel 01 and 02, not causing bandwidth limitations between each other, and linked using channel 07 with a 3rd and 4th access point used for the purpose only to link the two public accessable access points together.

2>

Main access site (located on personal residence)
x1 access point. *public access point channel 01 boosted to 500mW (17dBm transmit gain/10dBm receive gain) in to a 3-4dBi omni-directional antenna for public (ERIP 1000mW, that would cover 3,000 people here if they used a booster aswell). Mains power available and mounted away from my house as I don't like radiation full stop, on the property boundries up a pole to the limit the local laws allow, here it's 7m's long if attached to the house, 13m long if it's standing alone before resource consent is required.

Secondary access site (located on business building in town for a few beers and self powered). 1 access point *public access point channel 01 running in 'repeater mode' boosted to 500mW (17dBm transmit gain/10dBm receive gain) in to a 3-4dBi omni-directional antenna for public (ERIP 1000mW, that would cover 3,000 people here if they used a booster aswell). 30Amp deep cycle panasonic etc... capable of 6-9Amp charge, seald lead acid battery with voltage regulator and 6-9Amp panel array. Draw design of around 2-3Amps per hour. (effectively providing 2-3amp charge per hour over 2-3 amp draw).

This case shows only 2 access points, one the 'access point' the other the repeater point. However, bandwidth limitations are included as both points are serving all nodes on the single wireless channel with no individual backbone between the two. If the repeater is to far away from the access point, the repeater will be redundant as signal can not be acheived between the two. In this case, a power divider splits the 500mW signal from the booster to two outputs for two antenna's. 3dB loss must come in to effect for the divider leaving only 250mW to be split, = 125mW output to each antenna. Using a higher gain omni-directional antenna to serve the public with around 200-500mW ERIP left over as omni's don't get to high in gain before becoming directional, and a higher gain directional antenna such as a parabolic or grid to fire the seconnd output through a more narrow beam between the access point and repeater site. This dividing idea would have to happen at each end to create an antenna array, one for local and one for directional linking.


If those give you any ideas cool, that's kinda the same as what I'm doing.

Gavin.