I have a question about setting up temporary communications along a roadway to support our equipment, which is used in the road construction industry.

As a rule, we use cell, WiFi, XBee@900 MHz, and some satellite to provide communications between our boxes. However, a portion of our jobs are along roads that are not line of site, where there is no cell service, and where satellite communications are problematic due to mountains and canyons and the like.

For these special jobs, we would like to setup temporary radio links links along the roadway to support end-to-end communications between our boxes. The immediate job is about 900 meters end to end, in the mountains with two or three corners and road cuts and vegetation and the like. Certainly not an ideal situation, but that's life.

All of our units are solar/battery powered, so power consumption is fairly critical.

The idea is to pole-mount a number of units in the near vicinity of the roadway, each with their own battery and solar panel, and have the units work together to move data from one end of the job site to the other.

Our throughput requirements are modest, less than few hundred bytes per second would be sufficient for our first go 'round, although if additional were available, we would find a way to use it.

This problem is a little different than similar networking issues in that the resulting network is linear, so there should be not much question as to the optimal routing from one end to another, I would think. Also, at present we are not interested in serving nodes that are moving (i.e. vehicles), only in providing end-to-end communications between nodes that are fixed and not moving.

I am thinking of using the Groove 52 as the basis for this project and am wondering:
1. Are there better Mikrotik products I might use?
2. Is a repeater configuration the best solution here, or is there some other networking approach that is more suitable?

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Thanks
jw

Words... Words... Words...

Lets get some GPS and MAP info, maybe a picture or 2 would help.

Thanks for responding.

This particular location is on CA 299, along Little Cow Creek near Redding CA, USA

GPS Coordinates
Endpoint 1: 40.743628 N, 122.065895 W
Endpoint 2: 40.746391 N, 122.056033 W

For successful WiFi communication you need line-of-sight.
But indeed you could accomplish that by having a couple of accesspoints at higher spots, that can see eachother, and that can see the devices that need to communicate.
This is the original usage of "wds".

Thanks again.

We'll try to create our own high ground with a poles or masts. We only have access to the roadway shoulder.

We will go the WDS route and see how far we get. Literally.,
jw