townhouse coverage - mostly vertical

A friend just moved into a townhouse
while their house is undergoing some remodeling...
The townhouse owner just left for FLA for the winter.

Anyway - the townhouse has DSL, and the modem is up in the loft
on the 2nd floor at a computer desk - for a wired desktop -
No WiFi -

Thoughts on how to cover the upstairs area - loft, 2 bedrooms,
and the main floor - dining, great room -
with Wifi ??
Since the loft is directly above the dining/great room,
the RF donut coverage might prove to be poor....
Maybe just some experimenting with moving the antennas from vertical
to slightly off vertical would rotate the donut pattern enough to cover
downstairs \.

--
----------------------------------
"If everything seems to be going well,
you have obviously overlooked something." - Steven Wright

hmmm - may not be a problem.
Just walked around our 2-story with NetStumbler running
on one of our laptops... in S/N graphing mode.
Our DSL is connected upstairs on the 2nd floor, in an extra bedroom.
Walking around, found the coverage directly under the WAP was fine.

Orienting the dipole antenna to favor the downstairs should work
okay. If not, a directional antenna should put a good signal through
those floors. The concrete, metal, and wood in a building can
attenuate the wi-fi signal if you're going through more than two
levels - the throughput starts going dow.

As for antennas with gain, a yagi, biquad, or long helical should get
signals through plenty of wood and concrete. These same antennas make
it possible to connect over hundreds of meters of free-space.


Good Luck
Phil

wi-fi antennas: http://www.ab9il.net/wlan-projects/wifi1.html