Wireless range through many walls.

[trueman]

I am looking at setting up a wireless network for someone but I have a few obstacles in the way. The distance the signal needs to travel is about 40 metres however I have a house wall, two mango trees, two corrugated iron walls of a small shed and then a besser block wall for the signal to travel through. The network will consist of a desktop computer in the main office with an adsl connection. And a wireless laptop in the house, which will connect to the main desktop machine via a wireless connection.

I know the distance isnt that great but Im a little worried about all the obstructions in the way.
Any advice and suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[masraum]

the shed with the metal walls could be a big problem. You may need to get a better line of site that goes through primarily non-metal obstacles (or no obstacles). A better antenna may help, but if the laptop's antenna can't get the signal back to the main antenna then the biggest antenna around won't help. Depending upon the setup I've had great luck with moving the antenna's around and adding reflectors. The reflectors primarily focus the signal where you want it to go and keep you from wasting it where you don't need it to go. If your laptop doesn't have an external antenna it'll be hard to get a reflector on it.

[trueman]

Thinking about it I could move the router to the other end of the building so I only have a besser block wall and the house wall to get the signal through. Plus it would decrease the distance to about 25 metres? The only problem is that the router would have to have cable that is around 15 metres long, but that shouldn't really be a problem should it?

[masraum]

50 ft of cable shouldn't be a problem. Moving the router sounds like a great idea. Inside my house I moved my router about 6 feet from the top of a bookshelf to the top of the closet right next to the book shelf and got an extra 10-12 dB.