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Originally Posted by geolemon
I perhaps wasn't clear...
How would a wifi card help me, when I have an antenna on the roof, and a computer in a basement?
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By you even asking this question even proves my point even more that you haven't done the slightest bit of research. If you don't know why you need a Wifi card to use Netstumbler, then you haven't read a single bit of information about what Netstumbler is or how it works.
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This is the hardware forum, correct? 
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Yep, it is.
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No offense, but your torrent of acronyms and lack of explanation is hardly an approach that's going to give me confidence in your words in the face of IT people I know personally giving me suggestions (unfortunately some of them conflicting, perhaps leading me where I am now), and online reference materials that conflict directly with what you say:
http://www.radiolabs.com/Articles/wifi-antenna.html
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You're right, you have no reason to believe anything that anyone says here. But are your IT guys that you know personally professionals in the field of Wifi installation? I would say they're not since they're giving you conflicting information and one apparently making the statement that the more power the better. Which is just silly because if he knew the first thing about RF in this band, he would know that more power is not necessarily better and could quite possibly be dangerous.
When I first started on this forum and before I even made my first post I read hundreds if not thousands of posts here. Every single time I came across a term I didn't know, I searched for it. I did a contextual search. You know, typing in like phrases in relation to the term you're searching for so that you find relevant answers. If you can't do that, then you're already in way over your head. It's amazing how much information you can find if you'd search on the phrases that I posted originally and do a "+wifi" to it.
If you don't have the time or the patience to learn about what you're doing then you're already in way over your head because apparently you don't even realize the danger involved in what you're attempting to do. If you don't know that you're doing something potentially dangerous then that's even worse.
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Also - things like "fresnel zone calculation" seem like a nice tweaky thing to do to fine-tune, get things working optimally...
...my problem seems more fundamental, more hardware-level oriented.
I need to get the hardware working together, and the software (maybe netstumbler isn't it - it worked with my laptop!) to recognize it.
I'm not at the tweaky stage here - I'm looking to get things mechanically "together' first, if you will.
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You should have done a Fresnel Zone Calculation before you even made your first purchase of any hardware. As well as determined if you actually had RF LOS. These are all basics of building a functional Wifi system like what you're doing. But hey, go ahead and believe those IT people that you know professionally because they certainly haven't steered you wrong so far. I'm guessing that not a single one of them even mentioned any of these things to you. Which just proves that point that they don't know what they're talking about to begin with.