Does anyone know of any wireless that can span quite a long distence, there are no obstructions and I need to go about 17 miles (90,000 Feet)

I have been researching to launch a sounding balloon with some photo equipment, gps tracking, wireless connection back to ground, and a linux based system to control everything and transfer the pictures and or video realtime back to ground.

Every place I see people doing this they are using ham radio to transmit data but it does not seem to be very reliable and the connection is only about 9600k at best.

I have found some equipment that would work fine but it is over $1,000 I am hoping there is some way to use something like a 802.11b with external antenna but I have not seen anything that will span nearly that distance. If you want to see someone that did something similar here is a link on the web:
http://vpizza.org/~jmeehan/balloon/

Some cellular phone companies are starting to offer the ability to conect through their networks. It's supposedly about the same speed as a 56k modem, and still a little pricey, but it might do what you want.

Thats an idea that I had not thought of, do they have the ability to broadcast that far?

You could try this. Has a secondary use as well.

That looks to be the best I have seen so far, still won't quite do the range so I would have a dark period while I was out of range so I would have to have the onboard system cache video and other data till it came back into range.

The onboard system I am planning is just going to run off from a usb memory stick or something like that, no hard drive or video or any cards just a bare board, processor, ram and serial/usb connections. That being said drive space is a bit precious and I am wanting to be taking good quality shots.

Seen this?
http://www.eeproductcenter.com/rf-mi...cleID=30000302

Don't know how much it costs, though.

Dave

I am going to take a wild guess that you read slashdot :-) I saw that on slashdot a couple of days ago, I am guessing by the looks they are not cheap. I went to their site and see the modules are only $39 if you buy 1000 at a time but I think you have to have a piece of equipment to plug the module into and I didn't see how much that was.

on your end, get an old primestar dish and hook it to your wifi card. on the balloon, make some sort of yagi/omnidirectional antenna that will increase its range.

then just aim and fire