Cash for anyone that can help

Hi there,

As the post says, I've got a few hundred dollars with someones name on it if they can come around to my place and help me with my issue.

Here's the deal.

I was living with a mate, I've since moved out and have bought a house around 100 metres up the road. We've been thinking about how we could hook our networks up easily and one day my mate came across 2 old sky dishes at a garage sale and so he bought them.

I've since got hold of 2 Cisco Aironet 340 series WIFI bridges from my work who didn't need them any longer after upgrading.

Both of us are switched on when you talk about the IT side of things and getting the bridges to talk, that's all sorted and working perfectly when cabled together, when you talk about radio stuff and how to hook them up to the dishes, then we're both clutching at straws.

So what we tried was putting up the dishes on our roofs and pointing them at each other as best we could just using rough directions. I've run Sky approved COAX from the dish down to the lounge where I have the Cisco WIFI bridges. I've had some converters made up from the special Cisco plug that's on the bridges to the standard sky digital uhf connector and then I've just got the cable running straight from the dish into that converter.

So, it all looks like it should work, but doesn't. I think I probably thought it was simpler than it looked..............

So, they will talk to each other when on the same bench and I've tested using some Cisco antenna's at work about 100m apart and works sweet so I'm 100% sure the bridges are OK.

I'm assuming the issue is either

1. The part on the end of the dish that the cable goes into, is good for sky, but totally wrong for what I'm after and needs modifying.

2. They're badly aligned..........(there is the top of a tree in the way of the 2 houses, but I assumed it would still at least see each other with crap signal if that was all it was.

So in short, everythings pretty much in place (or can be put there quickly), all I want is to be able to get someone to come around and setup, modify or do whatever you have to, to make it work and we'll work out some payment.

I'm interested in how it all works, but don't want to have to spend hours getting it going through trial and error so I'm happy to just pay someone who knows.

Can anyone help ???

My e-mail is fraser@gtrcentral.com and I'm based in Belmont Domain, Lower Hutt, Wellington....

Thanks

Needless to say

When you say you have used sky dishes as antennas, have you modified them for use with WiFi frequencies?

A dish as configured for Sky is totally unuseable for WiFi - for one it has a receive only frequency converter at the business end - this is used to lower the received [satellite] frequency to one that won't get lost in the cable between the dish, and the decoder. (It's not designed for two way communication).

Secondly, as Sky frequencies are so far different from those used for WiFi, you would need to replace the 'antenna / converter' part with an antenna suitable for WiFi frequencies. The reflector (dish part) is really the only item that can be reused.

You may be better off purchasing some antennas designed for the purpose.

Think you might have got the wrong end of the stick. With some mod'in these dishes work great (I'm talking 30+ kms) but as "wuppo" states, the business end is useless. Sounds like you might be wise to invest your funds in some "off-the-self" gear or...

Go to http://www.trevormarshall.com/biquad.htm...
Find yourself some copper wire, a small piece of sheet metal (copper is good but tin wiil do) and a small piece of copper pipe (about the same dia as coax). Bend & solder everything together with as much care as you can spare and you away!
Build things right and the only problem you should face is lining up two very narrow beams at close range!

If you have some skills and want to have fun...build two bi-qauds or...
forget the dishes & build a pair of 'cantennas' (should cover 100m ok) or...
just buy a couple of yagis as you can be sure these will always work!!

Check out http://www.gumbootwireless.net/diy.htm for some other di-Wi-fi.

Brilliant advice, thanks guys.

Yeah as I suspected in my original post, it's the receive only style setup with the sky dish that's hurting me.

I'll have a read through the websites suggested and see how we go.

Thanks again for the help.

Does anyone know someone that would be willing to help in return for some cash as the title suggests ?? I'm talking at least $ 150.......

Fraser