high gain wifi

[A. Crow]

Post your favorite high gain antennas, colander mashups, and coat hanger yagi rigs so crow can become inspired to better steal his neighbor's wifi.

[IdiotWithGuns]

Cisco Aironet 1200

[HeK]

I have a bunch of Motorola 800G bridges stripped down and mounted in weather-proof housings, with molex water/dust-proof RJ45 jacks mated with Dlink 5.5dB gain antennas mounted on 18" DSS dishes....

.....

[IdiotWithGuns]

you kidding....
Pictures?

[[fr31ns]Karrde]

lol.  All my nieghbors got wise and secured their internets.

[HeK]

you kidding....
Pictures?

It's all out at the farm, three hours away.
I do have a water-damaged node here somewhere. I'll take some shots of that.
I have to build another one. I'm going to start potting them now.

[A. Crow]

yes, pictures please.

our demand for pictures has suddenly reminded me of something else:
*ahem* tits or gtfo, even?

Verily, teh tech is teh nerd porn.

[IdiotWithGuns]

yes, pictures please.

our demand for pictures has suddenly reminded me of something else:
*ahem* tits or gtfo, even?

Verily, teh tech is teh nerd porn.

agreed

[HeK]

I found my broken node, it has been mostly dismantled. I have already salvaged the 'weather proof' molex RJ45 union for another project. I'm going to start coating them in silicon epoxy in the future as they leak if the jacket isn't perfectly sealed.

Here is the housing with an antenna jack (left) and indicator (top). This was a first version and we were dumb. Newer versions have a bottom mounted antenna. The molex RJ45 is on the bottom (not pictured because it's just a hole atm)


Here is the board mounted into the housing. The antenna jack is connected to the miniPCI wifi card. The wires at the top are for power (ghetto PoE) and the indicator.


A close-up of the bridge:


Back of the board:


Water damage:



In the future I will be coating the components with this:

[A. Crow]

ver'nice, ver'nice indeed.  If I ever need to network a farm- I'll consult you.  As it is, my aunts ( aunts A & B) scrapped the plans to network lake houses A, B, C & D together after aunt C tried to do it before I got there.  So, no hopes of large scale wifi project in my near future.  At aunt A's house I just got to put in a new wireless network, (it's a big house) so a router and 2 repeaters were needed to cover the whole of the house + patio/pool, it's what i'm on atm.  Ok, I could have done it with less, and alot cheaper but she was pretty insistent that I not modify the equipment.  Before I left my apartment, I found a Belkin 802.11n router with MIMO across my backyard, so I think I'm just going to get this and let it pay for itself in a little over a month of use. 

[Luinbariel]

My brother had to do most of the groundwork actually; he had to convince a company to actually put some money into the project as well as the neighbours; a HUGE tower needed to be built on the main farm that was high enough about the trees to be of use.

[A. Crow]

a HUGE tower needed to be built on the main farm that was high enough about the trees to be of use.

My father once told me that some of the best work in telecommunications was done with a chainsaw. 

[Luinbariel]

I don't think you understand just how many trees I'm talking here.

We're talking MANY kilometres of trees that needed to be cut in terrain like this: that's a lot of trees and would likely become a government undertaking.

If I could remember exactly where the original tower we needed to be in line with was, I would point that out too...

[HeK]

The server provider is roughly 6 miles away, across private and government owned land.
The tower we have is only a 100 footer.

[Ceceil Felias]

I bought a 5db gain antenna. A more normal-shaped one, even.

I didn't even buy it for the gain, though, I bought it because the antenna that came with my aBit Airpace card was absolutely silly-looking. D:

[at0m]

I have a Fontenna (7db directional antenna) that I used to use with my desktop to steal internets from a house across the street from my parents' place: https://shop.fon.com/FonShop/shop/US/Sho...=PRD-ANT01

I got it for like $5 when they first came out since I already had 2 Fon routers (a converted Linksys that I got for $10 because Google subsidized the first batch, and a Fonera that I got for another $10 when they were first released ^_^ <3 Fon for cheap networking equipment & free wifi)

Also, regarding Farmland wifi, a friend of mine is paying for his college tuition with this: http://darkhorsenetworks.com/services/wireless/ . He pitched it and got some investors to front the cash for the tower, shed, servers & fiber, but it's already paid for itself and most of his tuition in the 3-4 years its been in operation.