DMX over wlan with WDS

We tried September 2008 the first time to use DMX over Wlan in Klangwolke of Ars Electronica in a professional show - 5 stations, one on a moving boat on the river, the rest with a minimum of 200m and a maximum of 1 km.

To reduce network traffic and for security reasons we decided to take 5 ChamSys MagicQ Consoles with the possibility of wireless remotes - as router we took 5 Buffalo WHR-HP-54G - flashed with DD-WRTv24 and WDS - I tried this two weeks before and had quite good signal between the 1 km (of course we changed the default Antenna to professional Yagis).

After setup nothing worked - WDS did not work at all - our needs are client to client, not client to Internet - the signal quality shown in the webif of DD-WRT was good, but I had no connection between the MagicQ Consoles.

Ok - I changed from WDS to client mode, this worked, but extremely long delays (up to 6 sec), net sometime breaking down .... so what to do, 4 days left to the performance, where at least 30.000 people will come to watch the show.

We found 5 new routers and run it with the original firmware of Buffalo - it worked somehow, delays was much better, but the moves of the movingheads was not smooth and the funny thing - in the night the signal was very good, but as soon as the sun arrievd, the signal was gone - so we decided to used it only for programming in the night and run the show