Me and my buddy Bitz have been playing with wifi antennas trying to boost the signal. We had tried cantennas and all that but it didn't seem to work the way we wanted. Finally, we came across information about mounting a bi-quad antenna on an old satellite dish so we decided to try that.
We tried just one at first and we were picking up a lot of signals in the city but we were going for distance. We managed to walk 3 blocks before the signal dropped. A few days later, we made some adjustments to it and built a second one then we took them both out to the county to see how far they would go.
After about 2 hours of trial and error with the adjustments, we managed to get ~25kbps at a distance of 1KM. We decided to call it a night because the bugs were getting bad but we will be playing with the antenna construction a bit and then going out to try again. Here are some pictures of the setup in action.
Battery, power inverter, router, antenna and laptop on one end
Bitz driving off with the other side of the setup
Bitz at 200 meters
39% signal quality at 400 meters
Link still working at 1KM