On 10/4/06, Blair J. Weiss wrote: > I have a friend "as the crow flies" about 1.5 miles through the deep, hilly > woods (no line of site). What I think I am looking for a some sort of solar > or very low powered device(s) (and cheap) I can place out in the woods > between the two houses to network them and bug into his high speed > connection. > > Has anyone any experience or know of such a device? I have been looking into this to provide net access for my parents cabin. Cheapest option IMO would be Linksys WRT54GL routers, and using the Freifunk firmware. It uses the OLSR mesh routing protocol. The drawback to the protocol is that you cut your speed in half each hop, although if you are running at 54Mbps into a cable modem at 6Mbps, you have > 3 hops before reducing your bandwidth. Basically you flash the devices with the firmware, reboot, punch in some IP addresses, and they will all talk to each other automatically. When one is connected to the internet, it will announce itself as a gateway, and all of the nodes will use it. The one problem (for me at least) is the WRTs are actually fairly power hungry, since they are not made to run from batteries/solar. Up here in Vancouver, the days get short in the winter. There are some boxes out there made to be run from batteries (Soekris), and they use much less power on standby. Alex -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist