Outdoor wifi to 5 caravans - advice

Hi,



I'm hoping that someone might be able to channel me in the right direction for building a solution to create outdoor wifi coverage to 5 caravans situated on a farm field.



There is currently a standard Belkin ADSL wifi router that connects to the telephone socket. This is situated inside the main building, where wifi is actually not required. There is a distance of approximately 30 metres between this base location and the outbuilding that I have in mind for providing wireless access and which should be within range of all 5 caravans (situated in different directions, with none greater than 50-60 metres). Because of thick stone walls, it is not possible to pick up the wireless signal of the Belkin router from the outdoor points where wifi is required. So I think that the wireless repeater solution won't work.



At this spot in the outbuilding (which can't pick up the main wifi signal at base) there is a power socket inside the building. So I was thinking along the lines of using a couple of powerline adapters to connect whatever equipment is needed at the outbuilding spot with the main Belkin router. There shouldn't be any power ring complications between these sites.



The outbuilding itself has thick stone walls, so I was also planning to house the equipment inside the building and to run antenna cables to one or more (high-gain?) antennae that could be attached to the roof or side of the building.



Budget is quite important with this solution, and tech expertise is limited. Is anyone able to suggest a combination of equipment that would provide a suitable solution for this?



I started researching, then got confused with access points, wifi extenders, repeaters, bridges, antennae (each with different connector types) etc. hopefully someone can keep me right and possibly even recommend specific equipment.



Wifi speed is less critical than stability and assurance of range. The actual broadband speed is slow. It's a rural location and bandwidth is limited.



Many thanks,



Rob

You need a centrally located outdoor access point with omnidirectional antennas. Then combination wireless bridge and directional antenna for the outbuilding and caravans.

EnGenius ENS202EXT would work for the central AP. ENS202's for the bridges.
http://www.engeniustech.com/products/outdoor-access-points-client-bridges.html

hard part is the attenuation due to penetrating the vans' metal walls.

I've seen RV (US term) owners use a WiFi client bridge (cheap, and is not an access point). They put it and its antenna in a window, skylight, plastic box outside/elevated. Run a cat5 cable from it to the PC in the RV. Much better signal strength than a laptop on the dinner table!

Yeah, powerline isn't likely to work well. Unless that outbuilding is fed directly from the main building there (which it might be), 30 meters for powerline is pushing it and having anything like acceptable speed.

You are better off either buring cable to the outbuilding, or running a pair of wireless bridges from the mainbuilding to the outbuilding, the ENS202's Thiggins linked to would work well with that.

50-60 meters is quite a distance unless you are in the open for wifi. I have antennas on my garage AP run to the outside. With 5dBi antennas I could get about ~20Mbps on my phone at 120ft, around 35 meters from the antennas. With 7dBi it is more like 30Mbps at 35 meters. Odds are good that I could probably get at least 10Mbps at 60 meters, but that would probably be it.

Granted, if I had a decent bridge with 5-7dBi antennas, especially a dual stream bridge, I could probably bump that up to an easy 50-60Mbps at 60 meters, but only if the antennas were in the open. Inside of a vehicle and I'd probably be lucky to get a connection at that distance, even with a wireless bridge and decent sized antennas.

If it is BYOB wireless for the caravans, I'd suggest two outdoor access points, the ENS202EXT is a good bet for the outbuilding. Place them outside, elevated maybe 4ft above the ground and replace the 5dBi omni antennas that they come with with something like 9-12dBi omni antennas. The outdoor access points should be placed on either side of the outbuilding so that all of the caravans has line of sight to at least one of the access points.

Whoever is in the caravans may still need to reposition whatever they are using for wireless access so that it is at least in a window of the caravan, but that should give pretty good signal to even a phone with a setup like that.

Only run the antennas outside if you can positiong the router/bridge/access points up against the exterior wall/just inside. With typcal coax used for this, you are talking around .7dB of signal attenuation per meter of cabling. So if you had to put the antennas on the end of 10 meters of cable to position them, you've lost 7dB of signal. Low loss cabling (LMR200 for example) can greatly reduce this to maybe only .2dB per meter, but it is also likely to cost 4x as much for the cables (maybe $60 per 10 meter cable instead of $15).

This is very similar to a small marina install that a friend of mine did... a couple of live aboards, but mostly it's weekend/holiday folks - about 20 boats total...

He went with 3 Alfa Tube 2H AP (using POE) on a small masts as the AP's, and then on the boats, used Alfa UDB0-nt8's for client nodes (it's a USB adapter) mounted line of sight to the AP - e.g velcro'd to a window or exterior panel.

On the client side, he drops a USB cable into the boat, and people can do what they want from there...

It's not the most sophisticated setup, but everything is high gain, high power, weatherproof and he gets decent performance for what most folks need...

If the caravans are scattered in a direction than you can use a directional antenna for better coverage. You can also place and wire the router to have the antenna outside. Outdoor wireless AP would be a better choice.

System Error Message said:

If the caravans are scattered in a direction than you can use a directional antenna for better coverage. You can also place and wire the router to have the antenna outside. Outdoor wireless AP would be a better choice.

Click to expand...

agreed - a lot of it is the arrangement of the campers, and line of site to the AP's - might consider something like the Tube 2H with high gain for the AP, and then patch antennnas for the clients..

System Error Message said:

If the caravans are scattered in a direction than you can use a directional antenna for better coverage. You can also place and wire the router to have the antenna outside. Outdoor wireless AP would be a better choice.

Click to expand...

sfx2000 said:

agreed - a lot of it is the arrangement of the campers, and line of site to the AP's - might consider something like the Tube 2H with high gain for the AP, and then patch antennnas for the clients..

Click to expand...

rr67 said:

Hi,



I'm hoping that someone might be able to channel me in the right direction for building a solution to create outdoor wifi coverage to 5 caravans situated on a farm field.



There is currently a standard Belkin ADSL wifi router that connects to the telephone socket. This is situated inside the main building, where wifi is actually not required. There is a distance of approximately 30 metres between this base location and the outbuilding that I have in mind for providing wireless access and which should be within range of all 5 caravans (situated in different directions, with none greater than 50-60 metres). Because of thick stone walls, it is not possible to pick up the wireless signal of the Belkin router from the outdoor points where wifi is required. So I think that the wireless repeater solution won't work.



At this spot in the outbuilding (which can't pick up the main wifi signal at base) there is a power socket inside the building. So I was thinking along the lines of using a couple of powerline adapters to connect whatever equipment is needed at the outbuilding spot with the main Belkin router. There shouldn't be any power ring complications between these sites.



The outbuilding itself has thick stone walls, so I was also planning to house the equipment inside the building and to run antenna cables to one or more (high-gain?) antennae that could be attached to the roof or side of the building.



Budget is quite important with this solution, and tech expertise is limited. Is anyone able to suggest a combination of equipment that would provide a suitable solution for this?



I started researching, then got confused with access points, wifi extenders, repeaters, bridges, antennae (each with different connector types) etc. hopefully someone can keep me right and possibly even recommend specific equipment.



Wifi speed is less critical than stability and assurance of range. The actual broadband speed is slow. It's a rural location and bandwidth is limited.



Many thanks,



Rob

Click to expand...

The bold text is mine in OP's post and while the suggestion for a directional antennae may be appropriate for other setups, in this case it clearly is not.

L&LD said:

The bold text is mine in OP's post and while the suggestion for a directional antennae may be appropriate for other setups, in this case it clearly is not.

Click to expand...

I would do high gain omni's, but putting a high-power/high-gain AP, and then patch/directionals on the clients... but directionals at the AP is something I would not suggest in this use case

But generally, Omni's are going to be less work in the long run - key thing is line of sight - if you can see the AP in an open area, you can most likely talk to it...

With the campers, either window mounts, or external mounts if a window isn't there..

Cool - anyways, Rokland is a distributor for Alfa Networks (along with others), and this is right along with their area of expertise - campgrounds, marinas, campers, truckers, etc...

In my experience - Alfa gear is pretty solid...

Rokland has a great selection of antennas, exterior AP's, etc... They only ship to US/Canada, but going thru their catalog, for overseas folks, can get a good idea of model numbers and source locally..

http://store.rokland.com/

In some testing a couple of days ago, I took my laptop to the front of my backyard neighbor's house on the street. My phone can sometimes see my outdoor network there (I take walks along there all the time), but can't connect. My laptop was able to connect and I got roughly 8Mbps down and 3Mbps up (2.4GHz 20MHz). This was at a distance of roughly 450ft (400-500), call it 150 meters. AP is a TP-Link WDR3600 in my garage with 7dBi omnis on pigtails run through the wall so that they are outside.

I would NOT consider it a good connection, but I WOULD consider it a pretty long distance and still managing to get a workable connection. With an actual bridge with real antennas at the location where my laptop was being held (maybe 5dBi omni's on the bridge) I'd bet a lot I probably could have gotten at least a 20-30Mbps connection both ways. Total line of sight though, no windows, trees, etc. in the way.

yeah, but as I said above... in many situations the vans need to use a WiFi bridge outside the tin can, or in a skylight, to get decent speed/reliability.

Cat5 cable comes inside.

Certainly, certainly. I was just pleasantly suprised that I was actually able to get a usable connection at that distance on my laptop. I kind of half figure to get anything I would have needed a bridge with some modest sized external antennas at that kind of distance. I'd think you could get something decent at 40-60 meters through a window on a laptop with similar equipment. Ideal would still be either outdoors, or better yet use a dedicated bridge with higher gain antennas than what you'd find in a laptop.

If the range is high enough than you could place multiple APs with good omnidirectional antennas that they could operate on the same channel if they are out of each other's range. 4 APs placed in the corners of the edge of the buildings should cover things. You might need to adjust the signal levels so that they dont interfere with each other or you can use the maximum signal but different channels (depends on how busy wireless traffic is). As long as the APs are placed as far apart from each other but as central area as possible to cover the caravans than it would work than just wire the APs to a router in the building.

The other solution is to wire the antennas from the AP all over the place but the signal degradation may be significant (you may need some signal amplifiers and a low bandwidth setting from the AP.