Repeating signal over a hill?

Hello
I am new here and new to WiFi too. I have twenty years of digital electronics & computer experience only to close down another business in our small town in New Mexico. Now I have been working with our local WISP doing installations in the hopes of getting broadband to our ranch in the mountains north of town. Before I came on-board they installed a 40 foot tower right behind a ridge one mile from our ranch houses. Ohhh soo close, but not line of sight. I've been working for five days in trade for equipment. Their idea is to use a Microtik router board and two antennae on the ridge powered by solar panel and batteries. The tower is very close although our highpoint is on the edge of their sector. I hope to go up there this weekend and clear some Ponderosa Pine trees from the path between the tower and the houses. Question is this: Is there a way to repeat the signal without the router? I have the local community college working on a 400-500 milliwatt photo voltaic system which should keep running for four or five days of no sun. A pipe dream is a passive repeater, but I gather they either do not exist or are unreliable, as my searches have turned up nothing current. I hope to repeat either the 5.7ghz or 2.4ghz signal as cheaply as possible, but I am able to work off the cost of a small tower and equipment, although my wife is wondering about my spending $750.00 for broadband.
Thanks in advance.
Brian Rodgers

The RouterBOARD is ideal for the task. They are a bit expensive but I couldn't recommend a better solution especially for the price. I have used them on solar powered sites with no worries; they have pretty low power requirements even with high power radio cards.

What model of RB are you using? IMHO the RB500 series would be the best value to for a project like the above.

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Jeremy

Marlborough WiFi Project

Why is it every country is leaps and bounds ahead on tecnology than the USA? The only thing I know about New Zealand is what I saw when I was glued to the screen watching Xena. I guess that says it all, eh? It looks beautiful. The country, I mean.
The routerBoard 112 , a CME9 radio board, in a Roo tenna is what I spent an hour assembling before we went out on our third and forth installations of the day. Sometimes we use 400miliwatt radio boards depending on tree interference. I have also installed grids, modified DSS dish, Motorola APs with the passive plastic dome dish. It seems there aren't a lot of things that do not work for wireless reception. I can't wait to get some equipment to play with. I will be reading your Projects and Experiments with much admiration. I think I am getting a little bit old for climbing around on people's roofs, but to tell the truth this is the most fun I have had in a long time. Antennae mods? What fun. On top of this I get to use my hefty experience in low voltage electronics to work with my son at the local community college on the photo voltaic arrays then stick one on the mountain to test it. One thing the local Wisp can't do yet is monitor the PVA through the router. This is something they want to be able to do for the college and it sounds pretty doable with the RS-232 console port and a Ethernet port on the router board.
Again thanks for the info.
Brian Rodgers

Xena?!? Whatever happened to Lord of the Rings? I never did watch Xena...

Good to see others enjoying working with wireless gear though!

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Jeremy

Marlborough WiFi Project

Hello
Yes I am having a blast playing with Wireless. I love learning new stuff as long as it is something I dig. Yesterday I researched MIMO and solar panels. Also I went to routerboard.com and looked at the specs for the 100 series. Pretty neat how they have a POE voltage/wattage controller which can effectively adjust the output power to the radio board depending on the input voltage. Up to 48 volts dc? The reason I was looking is because the head of the new Renewable Energies department at Luna Community College needed to know how much power my relay setup on the ridge was going to draw. He is giving some of his students the design of the photo voltaic array for a class project.
Anyway I told him the microtiks were 24 volt at 500 milliamp. Then at work we had to mod a batch of CPEs (typical) and I noticed the POEs we were to use yesterday were 12 volts at 1000 milliamp. Hmm I hate it when manufacturers do that, the three zeros cancel the Milli. It's one amp, thank you very much. And the power formulas state that as the voltage goes up, the current goes down. So I guess some of that cancels too. I assume that if we supply 48 volts instead of 24 volts the amperage will drop again.

Only problem I can see is needing four batteries to make 48 volts. Maybe I can find four smaller batteries out of a UPS. I think I need the solar equipment to be as discreet as possible so people are not tempted to steal it.

Brian Rodgers
OUTFIT