Flutterby™! : Antenna Mojo 2009-08-06 01:24:42.330257+00

Antenna Mojo

2009-08-06 01:24:42.330257+00 by meuon 2 comments

Kudos to Free Antenna Design and specifically their parabolic wifi antenna design for directional boost. Yeah, I'm playing with some WRT54GL's and Coova.org with the idea of fixing Greyfriars WiFi free public WiFi access to something usable by iPhone's and netbooks. The idea is concentrating the signal in the coffee shop and out towards the street, but not neighboring places.

Not sure if it will help, but I actually use DD-WRT on my home router, it has quite a few hotspot features and such built into it. Thanks for the "build your own" antennae link though, actually having fun looking at some of these plans. Way more information than I'll ever need, but it's still fun to look at.

Real world results: 2 of the parabolic WiFi antenna's at the coffee shop, in a WiFi war-zone (10-18aps detected, half on Channel 6) make for some interesting results:

Linksys WRT53GL running default short antennas, on Channel 1, from 40' away (front of coffee shop) puts it right in the middle of the surrounding signals at between -100 and -80db.

Add 2 aluminum foil reflectors, pointed to the front of the store: -60db avg in some spots, -50db. - but more importantly, everything else seems to have faded down to -150db or more. Huh? The "greyfriars" signal is easy double everything else on my bar chart.

I also tried some commercial Linksys 8db "high-gain" antennas, but honestly, I only got -80db to -65db, which was better than stock, but not worth the cost to leave out in public.

The winner: Home made aluminum foil reflectors on short antennas, directing the signal to the front of the coffee shop.

Side note: I had to 'ssh" into the router to change the 'Accept the TOS' page to something readable, but it was not hard to find the terms page and edit it with vi.