wireless connection between houses...

[Byan]

I have a friend that lives a little bit less than a half a mile down the road, (my father estimated 2000 feet)

what exactly do I need in order to do this?, all the stuff is getting cheaper..., and I want to know if I would be able to do this with a $100 or so budget....

thanx in advanced,
Byan

[Vernon Frazee]

Here's a pretty good Wi-Fi Standards article that also covers maximum distances (and the effect they have on performance):

Wireless Home Networking - Wi-Fi Standards

[Tuttle]

At that sort of distance you'll need some decent directional antennas, which will probably blow the $100 budget.

[104456]

This may be of interest:Homemade airial for $5

Make 2.4GHz parabolic mesh dishes from cheap but sturdy Chinese cookware scoops & a USB WiFi adaptor !
The largest (300mm diam)shows 15-18dB gain (enough for a LOS range extension to 3-5km), costs ~US$5 &
comes with a user friendly bamboo handle that suits WLAN fieldwork- if you can handle the curious stares!

Another option is to build your own directional Cantenna airial from a pringles or whisky bottle can.

[Byan]

at first I was looking through all these antenna's seeing how mux this "db" was, which from previous knolege was some sort of measure of sound (or possibly radio waves) but I had no Idea that 6 db doubles...

maybe I should get me one of those "spider skimmers"...

I am still confused a bit on the range part...

first of all, what would be the max range you could get outside without any aid

if we have a directional antenna on both sides, then how much more would that effect the range?

and it seems that range I can get = the original range times 2 to the power of one sixthed of the db improvement

R = O * 2 ^ (db/6)


thanx again,
Byan