This Week's Fad

Posted by stephen on Saturday, 29th October, 2005 @ 02:43

Our exalted leader works in a church in Canning Town. He gets on the Internet by connecting his switch to a long wire that runs from the church to a now empty building just down the road.

In the now empty building the wire connects into a wireless access point, dating back to 1998, when wifi was referred to as microwave and 802.11b hadn't been ratified and the equipment used the draft, 802.11 TGb.

From the access point, a coax cable runs out through the wall to a panel antenna on the outside of the building, pointing out and up towards a tower block over in Stratford.

The signal is received by another antenna on the top of the tower block, comes into the building to another access point, connects with ethernet across to the other side of the roof space into a big switch. The switch connects with fibre to the ground and on to the council's fibre ring, our network and the Internet.

This stopped working on Wednesday. And a few trips up to a 22 storey tower to block roof later...

...where there was some rather scary, old, hot and smelly lift-related equipment...

...and two knackered power supplies and one spare access point later... and we've still not fixed it. On Monday we'll be playing around in more detail.

Anyway, it's gonna me all excited about long distance point-to-point wifi. This site has helped pique my interest, especially in the waveguide cantenna, especially when used to replace the LNB on a satellite dish. I feel a small expenditure and some experiments coming on. Watch this space.