Will o' the WISP

I've thought about doing that. I'll still have to cut down some trees, but that shouldn't be too huge of an issue. My questions regarding this option are: 1 - Anyone know if these sorts of dishes have any power requirements? 2 - Would the approximate 300' run of wire from the dish to the house pose any issues? By this I mean, would 300' be too far? Again, these are all questions I plan on asking the provider but I just want to be relatively informed when I do so.

Google for "http://www.google.com/search?q=pringles+antenna" to get some ideas.

You might be able to rig a "passive repeater." The web isn't brimming with tales of success though. Pretty much anything else you might want to try will need power. Your best bet is probably to put a wireless access-point/router there in an outdoor enclosure, and run ethernet back to a switch or another router in your house (100BaseT has a 100m limit). You should be able to use Power over Ethernet (PoE) to power the router over the ethernet cable.

You've basically got three options. All of them are going to require cabling something out to that hill.Router and Antenna both on Hill (per Good Brain)Power over Ethernet from House to hill will be at its maximum range, limiting where you can place the router. You will, however, be able to get yourself a little slack on antenna placement with your antenna cable. Lightning suppression is tricky here because you ideally want to isolate the antenna from the router in addition to the router from the inside of your house.Router in house, antenna on hillYou'll spend some http://www.hyperlinktech.com/web/cable_feed900.php on the antenna cable and still may have attenuation problems. Most likely you'll need special hardware (an active amplifier) that can deal with a cable that long. The only benefit of this approach is that the router is inside the house on the good side of the lightning arrestor.Router in house, repeater on hill (or elsewhere)You put an active repeater on the hill with two antennas (one to the WISP and one to your house). This requires cabling power to the hill, but the benefit is that there aren't any range issues with 120VAC. It is also the solution that most folks would think of first when you talk about dealing with line-of-sight issues. If you have line-of-sight to a neighbor's house (where there is already power and hopefully, a WISP connection), you may be able to work a deal out with them and the WISP.

Mr Stickfigure - Thanks for the great info. I'm curious if you might have a recommendation for an active repeater as mentioned in your #3. A bit of googling turns up a ton of differnet options, so I'd just want to be sure I was on the right track. Thanks again.

IMO, short answer is that it CAN be done given enough effort and investment. Great answers so far. I agree... the WISP isn't probably going to be interested in engineering something for you, so you'll have to risk doing it yourself. Money, effort and time are involved and you may never get it working. One of the bigger problems is that it's a bidirectional link. Whatever you do has to work both ways. I'd start by finding out where you are in the radius of their service area... Are you at the extreme edge or do they have LOS customers a lot farther out than you? If you are at the fringe, you will have problems with any approach you take and I'd explore other options. If you are NOT at the fringe... perhaps you might want to experiment with a reflector. Is there a LOS point on your property that's also LOS to the remote antenna. This isn't a passive re-transmitter, but rather just a large, radio-reflective surface. No losses are associated with reflection, as is the case with passive retransmission. It might work better. Trig, compass work, some signal measurement technology, etc. will be useful. As a last resort, I think I agree that a ridge mounted transceiver and a long ethernet cable, using power over ethernet would be the next best choice. If you can make everything work OK with a laptop and battery/generator up on the hill, your problem is reduced to getting power and data cabling there from your house, a much simpler set of problems.

You may want to look at using a few http://www.locustworld.com/ Mesh APs. Not sure if this would work with your WISP's equipment, but with a little ingenuity I think you could get this to work.

Unfortunately, the only vendor with which I have any experience had its entire product line summarily canceled last year, so I don't feel comfortable making a specific recommendation. There are a large range of products that would do the job ranging from ready-made solutions by the big name vendors (expensive) to do-it-yourself solutions from hole-in-the-wall manufacturers. At the high end, you'd be looking at Cisco's Aironet line or its competitors and you'd be spending $1000-3000 just for the router. At the low end you could figure out how to box up a couple of home-routers (maybe the Linksys WRT54G with nice third-party software) with a crossover cable and all the appropriate lightning arrestors and a couple of cheap-as-possible antennas. Or, you might go with a complete http://www.staros.com/ solution starting from a bare board. (The software configuration and environmental considerations will be the worst part for those last two options.) You may want to do http://www.isp-planet.com/fixed_wireless/equipment/index.html. Unfortunately, while you can hit your local computer superstore and find half a dozen home access points for $50 or less, as soon as there is a second radio involved, you'll find those prices go up by at least 10x.

http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=301 is a story which you may find useful.