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My area does not have broadband except for cable. The cable company structures its price to get you to buy their TV and broadband
package, which is fairly expensive. I already have DSS Satellite and don't desire to give it up since I take my satellite
when I travel which is fairly often, once a month. My wife would kill me if I didn't take the Sat. According to SBC, they
do not plan to give us coverage since no new homes are being built around me. My telephone lines are probably 40+ years old.
My granddaughter live a mile and a half from me, and I can see her place, since I am on a hill. She has WiFi. Is there a legal
way to receive a signal from her using an ant24-1800 D-Link antenna? I am willing to pay for the subscription.
-- Gordon Eno
You can try to get the connection to work using what you have but I dont expect the signal to be reliable, if you can get it to work at all. Two questions that we need to look at here - what is the power level of the transmitter in the WiFi access point your granddaughter has and how close is her access point to a window that has a direct line of site to you? Most of the consumer level access points run less than 20 milliwatts of power. That won't really help for a link over a mile away. The small rubber antennas that most access points ship with wont really help the signal get your way.
If you can't get the connection to work with what you have, we need to look at shopping for access points that have the "bridge" function built into them. This is a function that turns the access point into a point to point connection between two locations. You will want to have the same equipment at both ends of the connection. This means that you will want to try the same patch antenna at each end as well. If you try this with the consumer type access points (such as linksys), you wont have a lot of transmitter power to work with.
The power of the transmitter and the directional nature of the antenna both will play a part in getting the connection to work. You may find that it will take going up to a commercial version of a bridge type access point with a transmitter in the 100 mw range and a more directional than what you have to get the connection to work. This can run into a little bit of money (between $1000 to $2000) to get this to work.
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