I’ve been REAL busy the last few weeks. I’ve been concentrating on finishing the house and have let the wireless connection slide. School is out for the summer so I don’t feel pressured into getting the connection up right now.
I’ve taken a few pictures of the house and I’ll post whatever I take to the site. Whatever pictures I have will be in http://grimsplace.com/images/home/. As of today, the pictures are about 8 days old. I’ve gotten some of the metal on the eaves and the west side of the house is ready for metal and siding too. I also got the front door replaced. That took about six hours of jockeying. I had to move down the electric service about two feet myself. That was interesting to say the least! My goal of having the house sided by the end of June looks to be a bit tight. I don’t know. It depends on the way it hangs.
In all the time I’m doing work on the house and listening to tunes, (thank God for my MP3 collection because all the radio stations I can get at my house SUCK ASS!), I’ve been putting more thought into my wireless connection. I need to increase the power. Obviously, with only one 50 foot run of LMR400, I was able to get a connection… in my van of all places. Adding an additional 50 foot run of coax left me with squat. I need to get the coax line loss out of the equation. My thought is to either mount a small PC or thin client on my tower and have the one run of coax at the DSL location or add an amp. I’m still debating which path to pursue. Amplifying the signal is the taboo thing to do, thin clients or mini PCs at each location with Power over Ethernet is the geekiest. I’m torn… I’m also cheap!
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
Rogue came over this weekend to help me do some signal testing. We went to the DSL house, climbed on the roof, and mounted the 900Mhz yagi antenna to their TV tripod. As soon as we fired up the computer and attached the antenna, we were getting pings. I was geeked. All of a sudden though, the pings stopped. I dont understand why. We couldn’t get another signal. I eye-balled it to my house and we head back to try to fine tune my end. I climbed the tower while Rogue read off meter readings to me. We were able to get a random ping here and there but nothing consistent. My conclusion is either: A) The additional run of LMR400 on the DSL end did the signal strength in. B) We just didn’t have the antennas pointed at each other. I’m leaning towards A.
My options are to try to point the antennas again using the WaveLan ptpdiag.exe program to show signal strength instead of the wavemon package on Linux. Or… I can build or buy a 900Mhz bi-directional amplifier and see what happens.
I’m frustrated. I’m depressed. I’m fucking pissed that I can’t get any service without spending a butt load of money.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
I drove out to the farm that can get DSL last night. I stuck my antenna out the window of my van and was able to barely hit my webserver at home. I was able to download a file at 100K+ though. 2ms ping times and no loss is good too:) My main worry was the leaves. It seems that this is not going to be an issue since all the trees have turned green. My next worry is cable loss on the farm side. I haven’t been using the 50ft run of LMR-400 during my tests. After that, my next worry is if the farm can actually get DSL. My distance-o-meter says they’re 2.8 miles from the CO and Verizon’s online checker says it’s all good. We’ll see. I plan to do one more test via the van. This time, when I get a signal, I’m going to insert the 50ft length of cable to see how bad the loss is. After that, I’m going to get some helpers together and mount the antenna to their tripod on the roof. After I get the antennas aligned, I’ll stress test the connection by transferring ISO images 24×7 for a few days.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings