Anyone tried the StarOs Router device?

I have been poking around here and there looking for a solution to my problem. I want to mount a device on my roof that will support an omni antenna for general local access and a directional antenna (to extend the wireless support up the street with someone else relaying it).

The two options I am looking at are (at the moment, more suggestions are welcome):

Option 1 - I can go with an ITX motherboard (the MII 10000), and put one PCI slot card in and one PCMCIA one in and mount it outside my house (on the highest part of the roof or something like that). This gives me shortest possible route to the antenntae but means both of them need to be in the same basic place. Otherwise I'd need two of the devices. The main thing I don't like about the motherboards is that they appear to be focused on the game market (they are around $370-$380 each, you also need to purchase a CPU, wireless cards, etc with them, putting the final price around $1k I would say excluding antennae). Then run StarOs on it.

Option 2 - I can go with (I think) the WRAP device listed at http://www.star-os.com/prices.php - it appears to be able to be driven by power over ethernet, so all i'd need is the device and an ethernet connection. It is $US290 but it comes with the power injector. Has anyone actually tried this device? They look pretty cool and would appear to give me the flexability. It is only a kit set, but it looks like it would probably do exactly what I want.

Suggestions anyone? I suppose the other option is to run a couple of access points, tie them into a local linux subnet and run all of the appropriate software - but I'd rather make it easier on myself :-)

Thanks
Richard

You could try 2 Access points together, routing one AP to the other which is basically what I have done with a Access point and a 4 port Access Point / Router and mount them out side using POE cables. all works out about the same costs

There's always more options...

If you require more functionality you could use two bridges - one for the omni and one for the directional, run them over PoE or RPoE and bring those cables back inside. From there you can hook them up to a server on which you can run any OS you please. This server can then do other tasks such as dhcp, web serving etc You could try a vanilla m10k for this task, I'm using one for my Smoothwall box and I love it

OR

You could just buy one of those starOS boards direct from Soekris and use Pebble Linux (a linux distribution designed specifically for the task you require) or LEAF linux. I havent played with LEAF yet but I think it's less functional than Pebble but more user friendly - it has a gui whereas pebble tends to favour cli

OR

Damnit.. I starting thinking of work and forgot what my other idea was.

No matter.. it'll come back to me.

By the way, doesnt the MII 10k come with a built in CPU like pretty much every other epia?