This was started by our friends. Price comparison for major grocery stores in our area. enjoy.

Price list PDF
Price list Google Spreadsheets

I ended up purchasing a Hawking High Gain Omni Antenna with 15dbi gain.  It came in an 8 foot long box when purchased from Amazon.  The antenna itself is 6 feet tall and requires a N extension cable to properly hook it up to the included surge protection device.  Before I test this outside I want to make sure it is surge protected (in case of lightening).  This experience is killing me.  I am trying to reach a neighbor who is only 550 feet away.  She is my “guinea pig” for my community experiment.  So far spending far more money than I desired to.  Wife is giving me much grace.

I ended up going with the Hawkings N-male to N-female 30 ft

A friend suggested using http://www.cablexperts.com.

I looked up a 30ft plug to jack cable from them made of 9913 and they would charge $55.00 for it. I think that is more expensive than what you are paying. They do indicate that Belden #9913 is equivalent to LMR400. The cable you ordered is HDF400 so they are similar but different cable materials, don’t know how to read the letters.

CableXperts best material seems to be LMR600 now. At 900MHz, 100ft of LMR400 has 3.9dB loss while LMR600 has 2.5dB of loss, but the LMR600 will cost you $115 for a 30ft cable assembly.

I guess the 9913 was the “best” grade for high frequency usage.  His information is useful. He also mentioned that your antenna should not be around metal, which includes siding.  Grounded metal effects your signal differently than non-grounded metals.  He also mentioned that the signal gets drawn to earth.  I will be attempting to put it about 8 feet up in the air for my next test.  Cable quality is king - there can be a lot of loss when making your own cables or using cheap “Radio Shack” cables for this use.

Stop the interference! - Network World

Microwave ovens are No. 1. They provide a pulse form of inference and typically hammer the middle of the Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz band. When they send their pulses, the majority of consumer ovens occupy 802.11 b/g channels 5, 6 and 7, but they may start their pulse on channels 1 or 11.

The second biggest interference comes from older continuous wave frequency modulated cordless phones.  These are not the more recent frequency hopping variety.  These continuous wave cordless phones typically occupy channels 0 through 2.

Fourth on the list are Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) cordless phones.  These phones are in both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz spectrums, and are a little nicer because both 802.11b/g and 802.11a access points can recognize the traffic and treat it somewhat like another Wi-Fi device.  The catch?  When these phones are handling a call, you can lose half of your bandwidth for the duration of the call.  If you have multiple handsets on a single base station, though, the second remote handset will permanently cut your Wi-Fi bandwidth in half.