Long Distance Wireless Network Design

Introduction

The design goal of this project is to design and integrate a long-distance WIFI "router" that can provide a connection from a remote access-point to a local LAN (with as much address space as you like) with full NAT capability. This is straightforward as we are using the Ubiquiti Bullet M2-HP. The Bullet M2-HP must be mounted on a mast extending upwards at least 30-feet using a fiberglass mast that can be raised and lowered with ease. The mast must have guy-wires and a base that allows the guy wires to keep the antenna mast stable in high winds.

Since the Bullet M2-HP is powered by a "poe injector" which is essentially a power supply, in our case we will be using 12VDC though the POE injector support 48VDC as well. We will run a 60-foot ethernet cable (shielded) to connect the Bullet M2-HP which will remain in the air down to a gigabit ethernet switch.

This amazing device is simply the most versatile and well-designed radio, router, bridge, station, access point that you could wish for if building something interesting and high-performance.

I have benchmarked the bullet today and it was able to sustain quite a lot of throughput I was pushing just about 20MB using a gig-e switch, a cubie board 2 (A20) doing nfs copies, a Windows 7 laptop streaming video, and streaming music using mpg123 to the cubie board from my local NAS. Interactive ssh sessions seemed lag-free as well.

That is impressive considering just how tiny the Bullet M2-HP is in a physical sense.

Ubiquiti Bullet M2-HP

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Power Over Ethernet (POE)

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This is a TOTOLINK POE100 removed from the plastic housing. I soldered new power leads into existing open jumper connections and while it is on the bench I have temporarily attached some Andersen power pole connectors to provider the +12VDC power. This is used to power the Ubiquiti Bullet M2-HP.

Gigabit Ethernet Switch

If your bench looks as bad as all this then you understand how that goes.

With a decent small switch, and hopefully gigabit you can build a high performance network wherever you need to as quickly as powering everything on. If you connect to a remote access-point and are issued a dhcp assignment you can route everything on a local network (NAT) to the net using that single authenticated client connection to a far away access point.

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Omni Antenna

I have a few omni antennas lying about not being used so for this test I just threw one onto the Bullet M2-HP and leaned it against the corner wall.

This device is on my sailboat. It is one of the most useful pieces of equipment i have.

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Configuration

Example 1.

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Example 2.

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WARNING FACTORY RESET

If you use a paper clip and hold reset in and power up you may end up holding it too long and it will blow away your flash and not reset the software to defaults. You then need to download the latest firmware from Ubiquiti and using a tftp server or their tftp2.exe (Windows, of course) and reflash it. You will need to manually set your ip on the computer you are using to something on 192.168.1.0/24 (the bullet defaults to 192.168.1.20) and load the flash into the Bullet M2. It is easy but takes a long time for the Bullet to reload at least 10-mins. It can be nerve wracking if you have never done it before and waiting for your M2 to start responding again.