As everyone else I wanted Adsl,
but since your line length cant be more than 5km to the telephone central it couldn’t be done, they said (the length to me is 11km from the central).
This winter I (2003) I started thinking about making a long distance wireless link, and a lot of people started smiling when I told about my idea.
The idea was to find a nice person who lived somewhere where adsl was available, and that he's (or her's;-) house was visible from my house.
This summer I was sitting on the top of my roof with a binocular, and then I found it. The place is a farm, but there is a lot of houses in the area, so the distance to the nearest telephone central is'nt that bad.. The air distance were 6km from me, so I started checking around for antennas based on the 802.11b standard. Then I went over to their place and told them about my idea, and after I had explained it they said it was ok for me to do it :).

After some research I found a Swedish Company who are making nice little (60 cm, 21 dbi) parabolic dish’s. There is a lot of other companies who are making antennas too, but a lot of them are f..... big, or cost a fortune to buy.

Then I found 2 old pc's. installed them with Debian 3.0 (my first meeting with Debian), bought a pci->pcmcia bridge and put in my Orinoco wireless pcmcia cards.
Put in a Monmothas iptables script for the firewall. (this have been replaced now, but its a really nice script if you dont like reading iptables howto's). Set up Mrtg to check the traffic load.

Setting up a status page with PHP. Since i started with PHP yesterday (8/10-2003) there isnt much here yet, but later there will be.. (still ain't much :)

Wanted to use mostly preconfigured hardware for the other side of the link in case power loss etc. If anything goes wrong you can just take a phone and ask if they can reboot it. If it was a Linux box fsck might need to be run after a power loss, and you don’t wanna drive over to do maintenance to often if you can avoid it.
This was the short version of the story. Mostly it worked from day 1, but there have been a lot of testing and it still is to make it work as I want it to.

Problems I had :

Noticed that the length of the coax cable from the wireless card to the antennas was critical. First time I tested, the length was about 20 meters on both sides. The link was working, but the signal could be better, a lot better. So I moved the 'base stations' up to 2nd floor and made some holes in the roof to make the distance shorter from the base station to the antenna (about 5 meters), and bought 15 meters tp cables to use from the base station to my switch.
I more than doubled the strength of the signal and I got rid of the noise from the computer its running on:)

Had a lot of disconnects. My first 'home side' base station was a 500Mhz laptop with a 10Mb pcmcia Ethernet card inserted. Built a new one of a stationary 800Mhz PIII, with a Emagic PCI->PCMCIA bridge (price 350 nok). Inserted a 100Mb nic for the local lan. And till now it seems like the disconnects have stopped. Not sure but, it might have been that the rest of the net didn’t like the 10Mb card, or some bad drivers that caused the traffic to the router to stall. Anyway it seems ok now running full 100 on all nics except for the wireless link who runs on 11Mb.

The Price ?

Until now I spent about 500-600$ on
the project.
I had the computers I used for Accesspoints allrdy.
Antenna :
150$ each
Cables/connectors : About 100$
DSL Router :
60$
Pci->Pcmcia bridge :
35$
Wireless pcmcia card : 50$ each
Debian Linux :
Free

Might have been some extras here and
there, but this is the price you can get away with if everything runs smooth :)

Plans for the future:

Make a 'complete' status page
for the services.

Find more stuff to implement.
Seems to be my the smallest of my problems since I got to many ideas :)

Share the connections with neighbours ?
Thought about it, but first i want to do some more testing. Anyway, the bad thing about sharing it is that I would have to put on all kind of filters to avoid 'bad trafick' since I would be the person responsible for the line, and the one who would be put to jail if its misused :/

More info will come...................
when there is more to write.

Bring me some coffee please !