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written by Patrick Norton on Monday, November 04, 2002
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Yes, Virginia, you can turn household food containers into highly effective directional Wi-Fi antennas that'll pick up wireless access points (WAPs) from ridiculous distances. In fact, building the antennas is a snap. Attaching those antennas to your Wi-Fi card, however, that's hard. How hard? On today's show, we'll show you.
Pringles vs. cantenna
Now that we've given you fair warning, here's a heads up. Pringles antennas are a pain to build and require more time than cantennas. Cantennas get significantly better gain, too.
Pringles antennas need lots of parts and fabrication.
* The can
* Wire
* Washers
* Nuts
* Threaded rod
* Tubing
* Plastic
* N-connector
Get the details for building a Pringles can antenna. (Props to O'Reilly's Rob Flickenger for this excellent how-to.)
A cantenna needs the following.
* A can
* N-connector
* A little over an inch of copper wire
* Nuts and bolts
Plus, Yuban coffee tastes better than Pringles. Here's the link to the Yuban cantenna we built. For an even more effective cantenna design, look at this project, which lets you tune it to whatever size can you've got available. Very cool, Greg! Take a look at his Homebrew Antenna Shootout, too!
**********************************************
No matter what type of antenna you build, you'll need to attach it to your Wi-Fi card or base station. This is where things can get difficult. It all depends on what kind of card or base station you have.
Most Wi-Fi CardBus/PC cards don't have an antenna jack. In some cases you can create your own or solder an antenna lead onto the card. This is not for the faint of heart. It involves cracking open the card and soldering a cable lead or a jack onto it, and possibly some tiny surface mount parts, too.
* Details on how to attach an antenna to an older D-Link DWL 650 card web page
* How to attach an antenna to an older Linksys WMP11 web page
Most Orinoco, Lucent, and Agere cards have just such a jack for an antenna. Does that make it a 100 percent brain-free process to bolt your antenna onto it? Nope. You'll need to buy or build a "pigtail." A pigtail turns the tiny (and very uncommon) jack on the back of that 802.11b card into a larger jack for your antenna. SeattleWireless web page has a great page of pigtail pictures and where to find them.
Do yourself a favor. If you want to play with 802.11b antennas, buy an Orinoco, Lucent, or Agere card and order a pigtail online. Our local purveyor of all things electronic, Electronics Plus (which stores something like a half million parts), didn't have any of the connectors used on these cards and didn't know where to order 'em.
While you've got that credit card out, order some LMR400 cable to go between your antenna and your Wi-Fi card. Ripping some old cable TV coax out of your hose won't work. Ten feet of common coax will absorb the 30-milliwatt, 2.4-GHz signal from your card before it gets to the antenna. Gaining signal and picking up your base station from halfway across town is the whole point of this, right?
*********************************************
There are countless ways to play with your new antenna. Once it's connected to your card you can log into your base station from a considerable distance. Like from your neighbor's house.
I can't pick up my house network from the beach, but that may be due to the 40-foot sand dune between the beach and my home. That's the trick. These antennas are directional. If you can't see the target antenna from where you're standing, you're probably not going to be able to pick it up. Case in point: I can pick up my home network from the top of a hill at the end of my street.
You could use a pair of cantennas and share broadband access between your house and your garage, or between your house and a neighbors'. Or just go for a personal distance record! Anybody for a two mile network?
If you use MacStumbler or NetStumbler, you'll find it considerably easier to survey base stations from a distance.
Have fun!
Source
Yes, Virginia, you can turn household food containers into highly effective directional Wi-Fi antennas that'll pick up wireless access points (WAPs) from ridiculous distances. In fact, building the antennas is a snap. Attaching those antennas to your Wi-Fi card, however, that's hard. How hard? On today's show, we'll show you.
Pringles vs. cantenna
Now that we've given you fair warning, here's a heads up. Pringles antennas are a pain to build and require more time than cantennas. Cantennas get significantly better gain, too.
Pringles antennas need lots of parts and fabrication.
* The can
* Wire
* Washers
* Nuts
* Threaded rod
* Tubing
* Plastic
* N-connector
Get the details for building a Pringles can antenna. (Props to O'Reilly's Rob Flickenger for this excellent how-to.)
A cantenna needs the following.
* A can
* N-connector
* A little over an inch of copper wire
* Nuts and bolts
Plus, Yuban coffee tastes better than Pringles. Here's the link to the Yuban cantenna we built. For an even more effective cantenna design, look at this project, which lets you tune it to whatever size can you've got available. Very cool, Greg! Take a look at his Homebrew Antenna Shootout, too!
**********************************************
No matter what type of antenna you build, you'll need to attach it to your Wi-Fi card or base station. This is where things can get difficult. It all depends on what kind of card or base station you have.
Most Wi-Fi CardBus/PC cards don't have an antenna jack. In some cases you can create your own or solder an antenna lead onto the card. This is not for the faint of heart. It involves cracking open the card and soldering a cable lead or a jack onto it, and possibly some tiny surface mount parts, too.
* Details on how to attach an antenna to an older D-Link DWL 650 card web page
* How to attach an antenna to an older Linksys WMP11 web page
Most Orinoco, Lucent, and Agere cards have just such a jack for an antenna. Does that make it a 100 percent brain-free process to bolt your antenna onto it? Nope. You'll need to buy or build a "pigtail." A pigtail turns the tiny (and very uncommon) jack on the back of that 802.11b card into a larger jack for your antenna. SeattleWireless web page has a great page of pigtail pictures and where to find them.
Do yourself a favor. If you want to play with 802.11b antennas, buy an Orinoco, Lucent, or Agere card and order a pigtail online. Our local purveyor of all things electronic, Electronics Plus (which stores something like a half million parts), didn't have any of the connectors used on these cards and didn't know where to order 'em.
While you've got that credit card out, order some LMR400 cable to go between your antenna and your Wi-Fi card. Ripping some old cable TV coax out of your hose won't work. Ten feet of common coax will absorb the 30-milliwatt, 2.4-GHz signal from your card before it gets to the antenna. Gaining signal and picking up your base station from halfway across town is the whole point of this, right?
*********************************************
There are countless ways to play with your new antenna. Once it's connected to your card you can log into your base station from a considerable distance. Like from your neighbor's house.
I can't pick up my house network from the beach, but that may be due to the 40-foot sand dune between the beach and my home. That's the trick. These antennas are directional. If you can't see the target antenna from where you're standing, you're probably not going to be able to pick it up. Case in point: I can pick up my home network from the top of a hill at the end of my street.
You could use a pair of cantennas and share broadband access between your house and your garage, or between your house and a neighbors'. Or just go for a personal distance record! Anybody for a two mile network?
If you use MacStumbler or NetStumbler, you'll find it considerably easier to survey base stations from a distance.
Have fun!
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