The future is here and it consists of cheap low-tech hardware, beef ravioli cans, Rustoleum, and probably some bailing wire. Using a bunch of off-the-shelf items, Jim Meehan has constructed a wireless access point capable of reaching any San Francisco resident with line-of-sight to his house in a 3-4 mile radius. He describes his beach (Web) surfing experience:
"I placed one of the WAP11's on the roof of my place near 26th Ave. and Quintara St. in the Sunset District and aimed the ravioli can antenna down at Ocean Beach, about 1.2 miles away. I connected the other antenna to the Lucent PCMCIA card in my laptop and took it down to the beach. I had little confidence that this setup was going to work, but amazingly, as soon as I aimed the antenna back up at my house from the beach, I got a signal almost instantly and was chatting and surfing from the beach! It was surprisingly easy to keep the link up -- it seemed that the antenna aim didn't even need to be all that precise." (via /.)