House to House (possibly 2 more Houses) WiFi Assistance Needed

Hi all,

I've been toying with the idea of trying to connect my house to my parents house and possibly other relatives' houses. Anyhow, my primary goal is my parents house. My house is roughly 2 blocks away, Google Earth show 0.34kms rooftop to rooftop and about 3 houses in between that could be blocking my line of sight. I have 2 DD-WRT routers, a WRT54GL v1.0 (R-TNC connectors) and a Buffalo WHR-G125 (internal U.FL-R-SMT connector). I was going to use these at each end in bridge mode.


Anyhow, I have a few questions regarding Antenna's.
1. Which style would people recommend for my situation? I was about to puchase a Yagi, but these Hyperlink 24db Grid Antennas might be better?
2. How about lightning ground? Don't generally get bad lightning storms in the PNW.
3. What's the recommendation for mounting the antenna and router/AP's to brick chimneys? The chimney's are the tallest points on my roof and I don't use any of my fireplaces. Was thinking of mounting the router/AP on the inside of the chimney and antenna on the outside, but unsure about mounting to brick.
4. I google earthed my other relatives, 1 home is 8kms away and the other is 10.5kms. Both are definitely at lower elevations than my home but I'm unsure of line of sight. I'm guessing this distance is probably not going to work, but if I were to attempt it, what antennas should I be considering?

Thanks in advance.

0.34kms Home to Parent's

Google CHIMNEY MAST MOUNT

Chimney Mast Mounts
See the links at the bottom

Sounds like a good idea. I was going to do that ( on the mast ). Until I had to do the push the reset button with a pin trick twice in one day.

Antennas: That 24 dbi dish is going to be very peaky; aim it right, keep it steady. You could get away with 2 12 dbi yagis, according to this calculator:

Support :: Calculations :: System Operating Margin :: Terabeam Wireless

IF those intervening houses are not a problem.

Great! Thanks for the tips Mark. Maybe the 15db grid antenna's would be better? Allow for a less precise securing since 16deg vs 8deg? I really need to get up on the roof when I'm back home and see if I can get line of sight over those 3 houses.

I ended up getting 2 19dBi grid antennas with 12deg beam width. It's proving to be a bit difficult to aim. However, I was able to put 1 antenna in an upstairs window at the house with lower elevation, and then hold an atenna on the front porch of the other house and was able to get around 85db strength signal. Haven't climbed up on the roof, but I think I should be able to get better reception roof to roof.

Picked up the channel master chimney mast mount. It was pretty difficult to aim my antennas. I saw it peak a few times at -57db but then I moved it and couldn't get anywhere close to that. Right now I'm getting -78db. The connection has some packet loss but iperf tests showed 8-10Mbit. At the moment, one of the antennas on the chimney and the other side is sitting behind a window. My goal is 15-20Mbit, anyone have suggestions for pointing the antennas or wireless setting tweaks, AckTiming, etc?