Extending Wireless Range Options

[VeeDub]

Thanks for all of the ideas guys!

[w4lna]

That "thing" for cell phones costs about 5 cents to make, and sells in most places for $10 to $20. What it really does is enhanced the sellers pockets!  

Speaking as a someone who has been in the wireless industry for 15 years, and a bench tech for much of that time.  If that "thing" worked, the manufacturers would include it.

Some research on RF propagation would be pertinent to this discussion, given that phones are in the 800-900/1800-1900MHz range (depending on which continent you call home) and the Wif-Fi is in the 2GHz range.

Hacking RF is a little (sic) different than hacking linux.  :wink:

That is *NOT* the thing that I'm talking about!

I've been a ham since 1979, received my commercial radiotelephone license in 1981, and a degree in electrical engineering in 1984. Was involved with radio long before any of that though. Worked for the Communication and Tracking group for ISS, see: http://www.knology.net/~murphree/ and have been worked on two millimeter wave RADAR missile seeker programs.

This is essentially a re-radiator to be used in a car with an outside antenna and not the flexible pwb sticker scam that was sold. I haven't seen one advertised for a long time since most cell phones have added external antenna jacks since then. We do a similar thing at work with antenna "hats" for microwave transceivers.

WiFi is at 2.4 GHz as well as the amateur satellites that I have a S-band downconverter for.

It would feasible to build a coupling device for cards that do not an external jack. I dismantled a WiFi PCMCIA card recently and its antenna appeared to be a folded dipole when I was really expecting a patch. My next step is to hook up the DC-18 GHz spectrum analyzer that I have and measure antenna patterns from some of these cards.

The learning curve for hacking RF is probably far less than for Linux for most people...

[VeeDub]

I would love to know if anything comes out of your PCMCIA experiment. Keep us posted!

[slocaus]

I give up, yours is bigger..... :mrgreen:

I misunderstood the device; I will however state that the passive radiator antennas that you refer to did not produce any significant results, according to my tests with a Marconi, and a study that I read in one of the RF trade mags, however I cannot find it online. It is not sold because the word got around that it did not work. I'm talking about a mobile environment here. I know it works in other applications.

And I will say "in my opionion" so we don't have to get into a pissing contest here.

[jchung]

what's a good PCcard/PCMCIA to CF adapter ?

and what's a good PCcard wifi card to use? preferrably 802.11g

TIA

[newkirk]

VeeDub: About a year ago (when I got my first Z) I recall seeing a thread on the DevNet forums discussing a similar topic, and mention of some CF WiFi cards that actually have an external antenna jack, but concealed within the CF casing...

That "thing" for cell phones costs about 5 cents to make, and sells in most places for $10 to $20. What it really does is enhanced the sellers pockets!  

Speaking as a someone who has been in the wireless industry for 15 years, and a bench tech for much of that time.  If that "thing" worked, the manufacturers would include it.

I guess you're talking about the magic stickers. "...Four Foot Antenna!"

The 'cheapie' version of the 'signal repeater' (the one most often seen) just clips over the window of the car and likely is as effective as magic stickers.

BTW - I had the opportunity to test the 'antenna booster' stickers on over 20 different models of cellphones, four different technologies. (TMDA, CMDA, GSM and iDEN) Of the 20, 17 showed no difference in signal strength via the (useless as the Z's battery meter) signal strength indicator on the phone. However, the remaining 3 phones lost one bar of signal strength...

j

ps - I think 5 cents is too high...

Well, if you upgraded to a C7x0 and have a 5500 lying around idle there is a more elegant solution (also works if you have other wifi equipped PCs around

Use mobile mesh from MITRE (free) to create a dynamic routing table, then set up an internal proxy and use SSH to route connections accross the network. I used to do it at one place I worked around the factory supporting 50+ mobile users with 25 static PCs seeding the signal. It was fast enough for VoIP

I still have the arm compiled binary around somewhere and can dig it out if you cant do the compilation yourself, but it's pretty simple (cross compile with GCC).

[ran]

That part, I get.  The question I have is how do I interface it with a CF wireless card that has no pigtail connector.

I've seen a few "hack your card"-type pages out there, but can't remember any URLs offhand (and haven't migrated my old bookmarks file to the new PC yet). I do remember finding some linked off one of the seattlewireless groups pages: I'm pretty sure that's where I found a table withsome "what's hackable" info in it. Try adding "reverse TNC" (with the quotes) to your search: that's one of the non-standard connector types that manufactureres use to "encourage" you to buy their cables and antennas, and it should help bias your search toward hardware hacker pages.

Ran

[VeeDubb]

Wow, VeeDub, my name, wow.....
I'm hurt.