The Book of Wireless, Second Edition

Installing a Point-to-Point Link

The first step in conducting a point-to-point site survey is to identify a possible signal path. In theory, it ought to be possible to calculate the required height of both antennas and identify the path between them, but it almost never works out that way. There's almost always a certain amount of tweaking required before you can fire up your radios and start to move data across the network. You can perform a preliminary survey with a good map (such as a topographical map from the US Geological Survey), but at some point you will want to climb up onto the roof (or look out the window) and confirm that there's a line of sight to the place you want to put the other end of the link. If the path extends more than ...