I'm interesting in getting a long range WLAN link going, something similar to the link that was attempted by the guys at the DNA Lounge.
Has anyone had experience of this sort of stuff? What equipment did you use? What sort of distance did you manage? More importantly, what are licensing issue are there around things like this?

We are going to try to link two buildings about a mile apart with clear line of sight. If it's sucessfull we may try further distances.

I've had great success with BreezeCom products. Both the BreezeNet Pro 11 and the Breezenet DS 11. I currently have 3 links up and running, for more than 4 years, with exceedingly reliable connections in all weather conditions.

I've got nothing concrete except that I clearly remember reading about 802.11b working with directional antennas over distances as long as 10 miles with clear line of sight. FWIW.

Here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448

...seems to have the famous Pringle can antenna design...

-Zeke

breezecom is crap. I've worked with their stuff for years, and have ditched them for far cheaper lucent,cisco,linksys,d-link, etc.

edit note.. the DS11 breezecom gear does not support ANY kind of WEP.. even tho WEP is somewhat useless, you figure a $1500 AP to support it.

I've been working on plans to setup long range wireless equipment on a 20 story building where our ham club has access. I am currently planing to use linux based HostAP drivers, and 200mw wireless cards to provide a high power base station. This combined with sectorized antennas would allow us to cover long distance point to multi-point. One of the major factors in our testing was because of the height of the tower, we were getting a very high noise floor from all the 2.4ghz stuff in town... cordless phones, existing wifi, etc. Using sector antennas, we can cut out the noise recived by each radio.

a couple of sites to visit:
http://www.demarctech.com
http://www.fab-corp.com
http://www.seattlewireless.com
http://www.tcwug.org

see the Moos tower survey on the tcwug website.

Are there any airports or hospitals nearby? It shouldn't matter if you are using the 2.4Ghz range, but there are upper power requirements that the FCC has. You will most likely need 2 directional yagi antennas. It will probably cost around $500 for the equiptment.

You should go to www.slashdot.org and search for this topic. A lot of the people there have setup this kind of thing. There is one city in Austrailia that has a bunch of people connected this way.

This is very possible if you do your research and have the cash.

Commercial yagi long-range antennae and WLAN kits can be found here: http://www.hyperlinktech.com/

I bought some wireless kit from "ASM Technologies" a couple of months back, they had some sweet D-Link outdoor active antennas available when I got mine, I nearly got them too because they were about 1/3 retail price: http://www.asmtech.com/

Worth a call!

I got some Compaq wlan cards, they were about the same price as the cheaper unbranded ones.

As it is, the Compaq cards have about 20% signal strength after travelling through 2 brick walls and ceiing :-(
I plan to make a home-made antenna from a design that uses a lot of cheap plumbing parts.

Gareth