The 3rd node & home town now bathed in wifi!!

This node has been amazing! Its something i never really had on my mind at all on doing. The next step was to setup an omni antenna and have whoever wants to access internet via a wireless network card drop in for the signal now and then. Just as I had just finished doing this, a friend and manager of the local electricity supply company, pops up at our office ready to sign up for Internet at his office, 2km away by road.

This would not be a problem at all, but his office is in a valley, total out of line of sight. But upon survey of his site, we realized he got quite a number of tall trees that could hold our antenna as we run down the cables to his office. But still, I was skeptical that we could get a good line of sight considering so many other tall trees around and infront of his office.

Having the long range multi client bridge powering the omni antenna at our base, I could confortably pick up its signal upon climbing nearby tree, about 50 meters off the ground. Well, this gave me strength to have a go at the connection. Having two linksys WAP11 radios lying around, configured one at take its position in the tree at the client side.

The 1st day, mon 12th, was all in vain, as it could not pick up any of the signals. This quite puzzled me alot and made me dig up more on how to configure the WAP11 plus whether they can interoperate with the senao driving the omni antenna at the Internet side. Reading the wap11 manual completely, solved the problem, as it clearly states, the wap11 cannot operate with any other access point unless its one of its own, that is, another wap11 on the other side! Well, i quickly configured the other wap11 and fixed it on the omni antenna on the internet side and prayed that it is powerful enough to push the signal that far.

And am now happy to report that it did not disappoint. We now have the remote site connected to the Internet and the manager is really happy.

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