Onehunga/Penrose border

I am a new person to this site but love the idea and concept. I am interested in creating a node from my home (Te Papapa in auckland) and am reading the sticky's posted on the forums. I already run a wireless network in my home with an access point, however it is of generic manufacture and I am wondering if it would be suitable, it is of course running on the 802.11b standard but I still wonder if I have to upgrade?. I will post pics from my roof as soon as I get them taken but as a general query what are the specs required to run a node from home.
I realise this question has probably been asked many many times before but I have probably missed the answers here.

Thanks

Mordred

well, you gotta get a wireless card or router that can have an external aerial attached

you then gotta get some nice expensive cable to run from there to your external aerial

you stick the aerial on your roof (or where ever others can get LOS ("line-of-sight"))

thats about it.

http://shop.borg.co.nz sells almost everything you will need

if you want to make your signal as strong as possible, the idea is to have the least distance between your wireless card / router and the external aerial, so some people stick their PCs in their roof or pull apart their wireless router and put it in a weatherproof box and stick that up on the roof (and do what is called POE ("Power Over Ethernet")) alongside their aerial.

good luck