Hi Ndukwe,
There are high quality boards on the market using Intel chipsets. The cheaper VIA ones we have had problems with, they "lock up" at full speed - though many users might never see that, we're an equipment supplier and our customers wouldn't put up with that.
V10000's suffer throughput problems, and M10000's and M6000's lock up.
The problem is that if you use the boards "as is" they still generate 10's of watts of power - and then the heat stays in the box, so you either have to vent it with fans, which allows moisture ingress, or change the cooling system - which starts becoming much harder to implement - though there are some interesting solutions which are not exactly DIY.
Give me a mail off-forum and tell me about what you are trying to do, and I'll give you some pointers.
stephen.patrick@cablefree.co.uk
Regards
Stephen
PS signal, you are right about delay, but at 1km there isn't a huge "free space" delay, the major improvement is using Nstreme (which needs a fast CPU) to combat the collisions inherent in normal WiFi at such distances. There are people on the forum who have tens of megabits throughput at >30km, for example.