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Geometrically Frustrated Registered Member #6
Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 04:18AM
Location: Bowdoin, Maine
Posts: 373
Today I decided to build a biquad antenna to connect to my gumstix computer stack. I found some bits and pieces around the house to build it: A scrap of romex, an RF connector from the junk box, some metal shielding from a computer case, and the bit of coax with connector from the antenna that came with the wifistix board.
The biggest hurdle was finding a piece of metal for the backplane. I tried cutting a piece of sheet steel with a hacksaw, and that failed miserably. I didn't even expect it to work, really. I finally came across the shielding inside an old computer case, and I was able to cut that out with tin snips. The rest was fairly simple. I soldered the connector onto the sheet metal with a blowtorch, and cut and soldered the romex and coax with my 150W gun.
Using the Marvell 802.11b/g device in my wifistix, I detect a -48dBm signal from my router (which is about 20 feet away, upstairs on my desk). My laptop with ipw3945 abg chipset reports a -53dBm signal. I'm not sure how accurate those numbers are (my guess is "not very"), but there they are nonetheless.
As you can see from the picture, the antenna is mounted on a satellite dish LNB. The crappy glue I used hasn't dried yet, but once I've got it on there securely, I'll put the gumstix in there and mount it onto my magnavox dish.
Unfortunately I can't have both ethernet and wireless on the gumstix, so I'll have to connect to it using USBnet. The maximum length of a USB cable is 5m, but I'm going to see what I can do to extend that. Suggestions are welcome. Thereis a plus side of having the gumstix in the LNB housing, however. It lallows me to use a very short antenna hookup cable, which is fairly important at 2.4GHz.
With any luck, I'll have some high gain wifi fun this week.
Geometrically Frustrated Registered Member #6
Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 04:18AM
Location: Bowdoin, Maine
Posts: 373
Yeah, I would have if I had one. kalenedrael seems to think that a copper backplane would be significantly better than my steel one, but I'm not sure how much of a difference it will make. Perhaps I will make another one using copper sometime.
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high gain wifi antenna
