Problem Wireless Bridge Woes

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I'm having major issues finding a good wireless bridge setup. I will explain my setup below.

Situation
Myself and a friend have pretty local houses, with a line of sight distance of 387 metres (No trees etc blocking)
We both have ADSL with our routers setup on the same subnets.
My Router - 10.0.0.2/255.0.0.0
His Router - 10.0.0.102/255.0.0.0
Seemingly simple problem, link the 2 houses with the fastest wireless link possible using a bridge, (ap and client setup doesnt work as we want, has to be a bridge to allow browsing both ways on windows networks)

Antenna's
External antenna's on gable end of house, 18dB gain Directional Yagi, mounted on aluminium poles and 20kV lightning protected via earth rods)
Both antenna's have 3-5metres of low loss coax, cost us £16 per metre, not sure what make etc but very good stuff.

First setup (4 years ago)

2 x DLink DWL-2000AP+ Access Points 54MBps

Connected fine, speeds in range of 700kb/s (about 6MBps)
Nothing seemed to help this setup

So we decided to change the AP's.........

Second Try (3 Years Ago)

2 x DLink DWL-2100AP Extreme 108MBps (Turbo Mode)

Connected fine, speeds using standard 54MBps same as DWL-2000AP, Turbo mode raised speeds to about 1.3MB/s (12-14MBps)

Stuck with it for a while, but streaming avi's and music (FLAC etc) is terrible, so after browsing bigpockets, they had a batch of cheap AP's, i decided to take the plunge.............

Third Try (12 Months Ago)

2 x TP Link TL-WA601G 108MBps Cheapo AP (£20 each, lol)

Connected fine, never drops link, speeds in 108MBps turbo mode 3MB/s (30-32MBps)
Much better, great streaming avi's, music, etc. Struggles now with HD stuff, so i decided to splash out and buy 2 more TP Link products, read on and see.

Fourth Try (Last Week)

2 x TP Link TL-WA5210G 2.4GHz High Power Wireless Outdoor CPE 54MBps

After using those last cheapo AP's and getting such a good link i decided to buy 2 of these Power Over Ethernet devices, mounted them on the pole, using a small 1m patch lead connected them to the external antenna's and proceeded to set them up. Thinking less cable to antenna, less loss, high power external units, surely we would get a better link that could surpass 30MBps, unfortunately not, these units are faster using the internal antenna's but even them only speeds of 1MB/s are achievable. Using external there terrible.


Now i am at a loss, i have to get back onto the roof to re-setup the 3rd setup we had, but i was wanting someone to maybe shed some light on why i cannot get a 54MBps full speed link over this short distance (5MB/s Data Transfer speeds or greater)?
Can someone maybe advise me on better ap's to use for the link, maybe newer PoE units that have their own antenna's (5ghz maybe). I'm at the end of my knowledge and no longer know how to make it faster, other than burrowing through the sewers carrying a box of cat6e with me.

Thanks for spending time to read my thread.

Ballz (Matt)

 

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I've just been looking at these items on ebay, obviously i know changing to 5ghz means changing antenna's too, anyone experienced/knows of people using these Bullet's.

Code:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Ubiquiti-Bullet-M5HP-Outdoor-Wireless-Access-Point-/270525026947?pt=UK_Computing_Networking_SM&hash=item3efc8c5283

 

Without using the external antennas and lightning arrestors if your required receive rssi is -65dbm than your system operating margin is still over 17dB, way more signal then you need to have stable link.
When you add in the low loss and the connectors and lightning arrestors let’s say that your SOM is around 7dB, still should be a stable connection even in the snow.

The thing to remember is Fresnel zone, @400M your antennas need to be 3.5M high and with no obstruction greater than 1M high in between them anywhere across the line of sight of the link.

As to you question about speed with a G AP in the lab you can get around 22Mb/sec max, for an A AP around 26Mb/sec, don’t ask about N because the jury is still out. Real world tops out at about 10mB/sec. These speeds are with enterprise class gear; Cisco, Moto, Aruba. You don’t even want to know the latency specs, these guys are designed to handle VOIP traffic!

You get what you pay for, I can get one of these AP’s in the states for $60, a new Cisco 1242 is still $400.
If I were you I’d check Ebay and see if you could get 2 used Cisco 1231’s, G radios, hell 2 Cisco 1230’s with B only radios would be faster then what you have.

Good Luck!!!

BTW 387M way too far for CAT5, try fiber?

 

I recently purchased a pair of WA5210G's and had similar results to yours. Marginal performance with internal antennas, and dismal performance with some 20ish db external yagi's. I am curious to know what you ended up doing? Were you ever able to get them to work? Did you end up doing something different?

Thanks!