Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[g'bye, Dick Rees]

I'm posting this in the "big boy" section as I suspect the requirements to do this properly are in the province of "not your average technician" types.

I do live radio remotes for a local community radio station and have reduced their cost by replacing the good old ISDN link with Shoutcast/Nicecast via the internet.  For indoor venues I simply wire into the LAN and that works very well.  But...

With the warm weather coming on I'm getting folks asking if we can do this outside at events.  My thinking is that if I can set up my own wireless router system in, say, a city park, we could use the internet from the home of any of our listener/members who live facing the park.  This would mean distances of 500-600 feet...or more.

Is there a practical way to do this?  I have my own portable power (Honda) and am willing to invest a reasonable amount in any antennae and/or other gear to set this up.

Suggestions?

TIA

 

[Taylor Hall]

Possible? Yes. Ideal? Not so much. I did a wifi install for a hotel in Cannes that wanted it pushed out to a cabana on the beach (about 200 feet from the hotel). A high-gain directional antenna pointed at an AP near the cabana acting as a repeater did the trick.

Just know that increasing the distance will also increase your chance for packet loss, increase overall latency and degrade your speeds. Your best bet is to get the antennas as high as possible and as close to each other as you can to avoid any physical interference and test the stew out of it beforehand. Wifi is a nebulous thing that can either work perfectly, or pop up with constant gremlins. Additional RF or EMI in the area can make a setup like this unstable, especially at the distances you're talking about.

Basically, make your wifi runs as short as possible. If you can, supplement them with a ethernet run to reduce the distance between your APs as much as you can (think XLR (ethernet) vs speaker cable (wifi)).

Another thing to take into consideration is the possibility of needing permits/certifications for some of the equipment as we needed both when installing similar gear, but that may have just been an EU thing, YMMV.

[Brian Bolly]

I'm posting this in the "big boy" section as I suspect the requirements to do this properly are in the province of "not your average technician" types.

I do live radio remotes for a local community radio station and have reduced their cost by replacing the good old ISDN link with Shoutcast/Nicecast via the internet.  For indoor venues I simply wire into the LAN and that works very well.  But...

With the warm weather coming on I'm getting folks asking if we can do this outside at events.  My thinking is that if I can set up my own wireless router system in, say, a city park, we could use the internet from the home of any of our listener/members who live facing the park.  This would mean distances of 500-600 feet...or more.

Is there a practical way to do this?  I have my own portable power (Honda) and am willing to invest a reasonable amount in any antennae and/or other gear to set this up.

Suggestions?

TIA

Dick,

Some of the hardware that would work in your application was discussed in this thread.  You can probably do this for <$200 in hardware, but as Taylor mentioned you'll want to get them up as high as possible.

[Chris Johnson [UK]]

Why not just do it over 3G/4G?

[Taylor Hall]

Depending on the amount of people in the area, the strain placed on a particular tower may be too great to support a stable broadcast. You could reach out to the various telecoms in the area to send out a signal booster, but depending on how much of a draw the event has they may or may not actually do it.

Additionally, data caps on wireless hotspots can cause for costly overages or speed throttling, and getting one that is truly "unlimited" can be very costly.

[g'bye, Dick Rees]

Why not just do it over 3G/4G?

Because they only support download.  None of the services I could afford (and even then, they're too much money) give any upload capability at all.

[Chris Johnson [UK]]

Because they only support download.  None of the services I could afford (and even then, they're too much money) give any upload capability at all.

Thats a shame!

I'm sitting in my house in London and getting 22Mbps Up on 4G. Lovely!

Sounds like you need a small mast, and an available network connection in a nearby building which you can bridge to.

I wouldn't attempt to connect to an existing wifi network. Remember that IP is a 2-way street, You need to guarantee strong signalling in both directions. I would use a pair of these (or similar): http://www.ubnt.com/airmax#nanobeam
Place one in the building facing the park and wire it into the internet facing network there. Have the other on a mast above head height so you get LoS to the one in the building and you should be good to go. The Ubiquiti software is pretty good at monitoring the link quality and transfer rate. I have used a pair of the larger rocket M units connected to 2' dish antennae to bridge ~600m between the Olympic Stadium in London and the Westfield shopping mall on the other side of the park and achieved >=100Mbps real TCP/IP throughput.

[Taylor Hall]

That ubiquiti gear is good stuff, I only wish it had been available for the various installs I did across the pond.

[ProSoundWeb Community]