My parents had an outdoor Ethernet cable running from the office to the house. Unfortunately when winter hit it suddenly stopped working. Since I didn’t want to dig through 3 feet of frozen soil in -30 weather (-45 with windchill) I opted to look for a wireless solution. I had a blast!
I got some pointers from Dave so I had a decent idea of the parts I was looking for. A few places gave me quotes, including one store that assured me that I should budget a couple thousand. I ordered about $300 worth of parts (a bridge, a wireless access point, an exterior directional antenna, and a cable).
The parts arrived today and I set to work. The one annoying bit was that the access point was auto-detected and the bridge was not. Fortunately a little fiddling with IPs got me connected. Just the little built-in antennas got me a decent connection to the house and when I added the directional antenna I got a beautiful signal. My dad and I made a little stand for the antenna so that we wouldn’t have to set it up outside in the cold.
There are sill a few things I’ll have to fix up. There’s still some visible wiring in the house (one of the rooms I needed to get into was locked). The antenna will have to be mounted outside in the spring.
Doing something a little different tech wise was a lot of fun.
EDIT: These are the parts I used: N Male To RP-TNC Wireless Antenna Adapter Cable, TEW-AO14d Trendnet 14dbi Outdoor Directional 802.11b/G Ntype Female Con Wireless Antenna, Linksys WET54g Wireless 54g Ethernet Bridge, Linksys WAP54g Wireless G 54mbps Access Point