Novilio

One issue that I didn't see brought up earlier in this thread is wind loading. If your antennas are out in the open (rather than tucked under the eaves of a building) you have to take wind loading into account. A yagi is good from that standpoint because it's basically a long rod with some teeth on it. Its wind profile is quite low, and once you point it, it's likely to stay pointed. Large parabolics can have a very high wind profile unless they're skeletal, like the ones you see at FAB. (They look a little like warped barbecue grills.)

I've BSed with guys here who have tried to use old satellite dishes for very high gain wi-fi point-to-point, and wind shoving them off target was a constant issue. It's not for nothing that in satellite service they're typically mounted on a piece of 3" or 4" pipe sunk in concrete.

I've found dishes no harder to align than yagis. Mounting, yes. Alignment is done pretty much the same way, the big challenge being the stability of the mount and the physical difficulty of working with something way up in the air.

One final note: This is a big, complex project, especially for a beginner. Research it thoroughly and do a test connection between your base and one of those outlying nodes before committing a bundle of money to hardware. Especially on the antenna side, like Thorn said, do the math. Calculate your link budget before you buy anything, or you will be sorry.

--73--

--Novilio
(freq geek since 1964.)