Where: Whinnery cottage on West End of Bois Blanc Island, Michigan:
There are 3 Islands just east of the Macinaw Bridge. Lets zoom in a bit:
Mackinaw Island has had military value since the country's beginning. Fort Mackinac was founded during the American Revolution. In July 1812, in the first land engagement of the War of 1812 in the United States , the British captured the fort. The island has since become a popular tourist destination.
Round Island is State land and wilderness
Bois Blanc (Bob-Lo to the natives) is mostly wilderness. History of logging and lime. One small town. Many summer cottages and hunting lodges
Cottage is a place to ESCAPE the modern world.
When purchased in 1973 it was a 2 room cottage - 1 bedroom and the kitchen/living space. Hand built from local materials (note stone chimney). Built in the late 50's
Use CB radios to communicate w/ neighbors until phone system was installed
Today:
Today we have most of the modern aminities except Broad Band Internet. Most still use dial up. Some use Satalite.
View from the front yard:
Picking up wireless from Macinaw: Proof of concept
Christmas presents! USB wireless stick, folding vegetable strainer and 20' USB extension cable
Testing:
Issues:
Hawking Unit (the Sombraro)
External antennas (Mac only)
The Cantenna , Laptop, and Linksys Router
How To Build A Tin Can Waveguide WiFi Antenna
On the Laptop:
#!/bin/bash
echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.1.0/16 -o eth1 -j
MASQUERADE
On the router:
route add default gw 192.168.1.100
Two solutions for the 2 classes of problems:
The Whale's Tooth and Router
From: Brian Deery <bddeery@xxxx.com> Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 19:45:03 -0400 Subject: Re: Bois Blanc Internet To: George Whinery <g.whinery@xxxx.com> Hi George, It was indeed not a Radio Shack project. This project involved soldering, Linux software, and custom firmware modifications. The key was getting a highly directional antenna with a very short microwave path. The router was modified to act as a repeater for wireless as well as wired connections pluged into it. I used a Linksys WRT-54GL with DD-WRT custom firmware. The replacement firmware was further modified to work unattended. I connected a high gain Yagi antenna to the router and pointed it right at Mackinac. I also did a Power over Ethernet modification to the router so I only needed to run one cable outside to the router. My setup sees 10-20 hotspots on Mackinac, but only connects to the strongest one. The hardware setup was fairly straightforward. Mostly just a big antenna connected to the router. The hard part was the software setup.
Flash the Linksys Router with DD-WRT firmware - it was a 2 step process - 1st to install a "mini" version which in turn preped the router for the "standard" install.
A wireless bridge connects two LAN segments with a wireless link. The two segments are in the same subnet and look like two ethernet switches connected by a cable to all computers on the subnet.
This How-To provides step-by-step instructions for creating a Universal Wireless Repeater appliance: a device that you can place anywhere and it will wirelessly repeat the strongest signal, onto another wireless network (with or without security). This functionality is also known as Wireless Client Bridge, or Range Expander. Unlike WDS, once you have this appliance setup, it will work with any open network.
Better antenna - looking at parabolic dish
Power over ethernet
Unattended operation.