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Remote Internet is a long time interest project brought to the front of my list out of necessity. During the pandemic I am living in an amazing friends bunkhouse in the woods as my house sold right before the virus hit the Ottawa area.
I had been researching wireless ISP's for some time and looking into setting up a small one if I moved into an area with weak access to internet. A really cool tool in this area is AirLink by ubiquity which allows you to map the signal between locations taking local terrain into account.
To get internet out to the little cabin I am staying in from the main house I looked into a few different options.
An easy one would be to use one or two wifi repeaters placed between the two structures however this would require extension cords cluttering up the landscape and some quality loss.
Another interesting option was to build a mesh network out of ESP32's or ESP8266's which would have some of the flaws of a repeater but I could battery power them off of a Bosch drill battery for 20 hours of use and place them around the property when needed. This is an option that I may investigate some more once I have a place of my own again as each of the repeaters could be part of a sensor network and solar powered. however it was not the option for now as it would need a different software build environment than i currently have on my laptop and the laptop is to old for it to be easily setup on (Its on my list to get a new laptop as I'm still keeping a 2009 macbook pro 17" running by replacing parts and soldering things that fail).
The option that made the most sense to me and that I went with was to invest in some commercial equipment (a Tp-link CPE710) and create a small mobile signal tower that I could use to repeat the wifi signal. This option was not only attractive as i would have an interesting piece of kit down the road to experiment with but it was actually cheaper than most repeaters and is capable of multi km link distances. Another plus is that the device has POE (power over ethernet) which allows it to be powered from the data cable.
The hardware is packaged well and assembles easily. One thing missing which has become standard with most products (even if its a bit silly) is that you require a small screwdriver to tighten small phillips head screws which lock the dish sections into place and the package does not include a cheap little screwdriver to get the job done.
Currently the antenna is just zip tied to a tree outside the cabin pointing in about the right direction to get 20-27db SNR which results in a 200-300mbps uplink and downlink. This link is much more than the internet connection at the other end and is perfect for my needs. That being said I have also ordered a 13.5ft lighting tripod which should arrive soon which will get the antenna higher in the air and should help avoid some intermittent relating to cars or people walking along the driveway along with maybe a few squirrels bumping the dish as they scurry up and down the tree.
The current network topology is that the CPE710 connects to the remote modem/router in my friends house via wifi. The signal is transmitted via a Cat7 shielded and grounded ethernet cable to a D-link DIR-880L which rebroadcasts the signal to my local devices via wifi and ethernet.
To get the Ethernet cable into the building and to my indoor router without drilling any holes in the building I came across these interesting passthroughs which use ribbon cables to get an ethernet cable through a window. apparently they are popular with renters and come in a number of varieties for the different style of cables that you might want to come inside. The issue with them beyond possible longevity issues and water ingress into the connectors is that ethernet cables are twisted pair and modern cables are also shielded to allow for the higher data rates that are needed for networking. As these are etched copper and only a single layer none of this is done and as some reviewers mentioned on amazon you get interference and reduced rates making them pretty useless. It would be interesting to see if a multilayer design in which the signals could "twist" around one another through vias might work. It would reduce the flexibility a bit but that combined with some external shielding might make these a viable option.
My solution to get the signal inside was to try one of the flat cat7 ethernet cables which works just fine under the door and does not cause issues with the seals.
On my wish list of things to get done on this project is to build a high ratio gearbox that can be used to aim the antenna from the ground or anyplace that has a wifi connection to the dish from a smart phone. Another option that would take a bit more work would be to build into that assembly the ability to read the horizontal and vertical signal strength from the antennas web interface and automatically optimize the angle for a better signal. that way the tower can be placed pointing in about the right direction, a wifi signal can be selected from the web interface on a phone or laptop and the tower automatically does the tedious bits to have your connection.
Down the road if I was to use this as a mobile hotspot for camping or something along those lines it would be good to build in another outdoor wifi kit like the Tp-link EAP225 and some batteries with a 24v boost circuit in order to provide a wireless outdoor rated tower that can be placed and run for a few days on battery power alone. That setup might come in handy if i do some live streaming from the woods while solar 3d Printing :) .
I'll update this page as I work out bugs in the system and learn more.
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