I have 90 pump/lift stations that I would like to send information from to a central collection place (office). The longest distance is 8.5 miles away. most of these pump stations are line of sight over a lake. What is the least expensive way to turn these old stations into a station that can send digital information wirelessly. We would also need a server? to collect this data.
Send and receive data wirelessly from 90 different areas to a central collection site. longest distance is 8.5 miles.
communicationdatawireless
Best Answer
My suggestion is to use long-range Wi-Fi. You want to use 5.8 GHz 802.1n, since that has twice the range of the more common 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi right of the bat.
You should put a omnidirectional antenna at your main location like this one which has a gain of 12dBi:
and directional antennas at your pump/lift stations like this one, which has a gain of 30dBi:
Since Wi-Fi routers are designed to work with local LANs which have 255 maximum devices (the lowest octet of an IP address), handling 90 devices should not be a problem, except I would set it up so that the communication from the pump/lift stations is staggered so they don't compete.