I decided to do some tests with a laptop and a USB 3G data stick to see how good the reception was in those locations. I tried about 5 different spots and to my surprise I was getting a reasonable signal strength and a download speed of approx 1.5mb/s which was allot better than what I was getting down at our house. The 3G stick that I had bought to run this experiment with was speed limited so that may have been limiting the possible speed that I was getting. My existing 3G Wireless router has a top theoretical speed of 21MB/s .
The best spot I found is shown in the picture below and from Google Earth is approx 750m away in a straight line
So now the problem was how to get the signal from this location to my house and how to power it as the closest power to this location was down at the house.
After discussion with a friend he pointed me to this device Wireless Device
These are a totally sealed device that is made especially for the outdoors and is powered through PoE (power over Ethernet), which means there is only one cable entering the device which is really cool
After reading through the specs which said it had a range of 20 km's (which I didn't really believe) and reading the reviews I thought this could be an option but there was still an issue with supplying power to the unit. I decided to bite the bullet and order 2 of them. (one for up the hill and one for my house)
I Intended to power the unit up the hill by 12 volt car batteries which I have a few spare floating around, and see how it went. I didn't know how much power would be drawn from the units so this was a bit of a risk as well as the Wireless range, but was worth a try.
Next Post - The Units arrive :)
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