Thanks to my friends over at Fast Wireless Internet, I now have my own ISP grade wireless equipment. I will be using this (hopefully) to build a wireless link from my house in Dublin, to my parents (and my mates) house in Laois. this is a wireless link of over 50km so proper preparation is paramount. The main idea is to have two directional antennae on each site, one for TX and one for RX, coupled with this will be a standard (high gain) omni-directional for spread coverage of the surrounding area.

The main equipment that is going to be used is RouterBoards running the Micro-Tik (Linux based) operating system, 5.8Ghz Wireless cards and some high gain, narrow beam (~7°) dish style antennae. The house in Dublin will have an extended mounting post fixed to the roof, while the house in Laois already has access to a nice big shiny mast (and a wind turbine)

I’m also in the middle of working on some security features for this, y’know wireless isn’t all that secure… so I will be using MAC filtering, WPA2, Radius and possibly passive IDS & Network monitoring. The Micro-Tik will take care of the first two, but I’ll be implementing a PFSense system on a PC Engines Wrap.1D too.

In order to house all of this equipment, I will be building a small(ish) NOC or Network Operations Centre in my attic, an more than likely my mate will just add the new equipment to the NOC thats already on his end. As a part of this NOC build, I will be making (meh, repairing) a 12V UPS and fitting it with some high AH batteries, moving my mini-itx to it, and building a custom P0E power distribution system.

All in all, its going to be a big, interesting project… I’ll keep you posted!