Hi

I'm in the peculiar position of having a neighbour with the latest 802.11g device from Apple, called the AIRPort Extreme. His network is, of course, open like a barn door. I can take my Windoze laptop, stand close to his place at night, plug in the Wi-Fi card, and surf!

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, the range of his AirPort leaves much to be desired - it doesn't reach as far as my Linux box, which is about 100m away from his base station.

Of course, I'd love to surf through his network, rather than on my shitty dialup connection. :-)

The first thing I'd like to try is improve the reception on the Wi-Fi card, and then just put one into my stationary Linux box. Does anyone have any experience with this?

What about adding a base station at my place? Do they have better reception? What about Aerials?

Any ideas / comments / suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Uwe

Um...Just because the OS is "free" doesn't mean that everything is.

However, assuming you're neighbour is cool with nicking his bw, then, you can build a "cantenna" for your card pretty cheap and easy. Google cantenna and you'll find pretty much everything you need.

A decent one can be built for $20 (American) tops. You'll get between 1 and 15 db of boost, and there's evidence that antennas can get the signal to travel 30+ km, so the 100 m that you're looking at, should be easy-peasy.

Yeah, I'd like to add that I wouldn't "assume" he's cool with it. I'd make sure

Its only polite....lots of ISPs now put on bandwidth caps with unreasonable fees if you go past their upload/download limit.

One ISP here has a "special deal" for their high speed which makes it pretty cheap, but the UL/DL limit is 1Gig upload/1 Gig download which is EASY to bust if you have 2-3 users of the system (Plus a neighbor piggybacking).

As for range, the above suggestion is pretty good. I saw a demo on cantennas and they seemed to really work good.

Thanks for the answers so far - really appreciated.

I _think_ he's OK with it.

LOL