OESF Portables Forum
Everything Else => General Support and Discussion => Zaurus General Forums => Archived Forums => Security and Networking => Topic started by: Anonymous on February 16, 2004, 10:53:50 pm
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Is anyone aware of a way to extend the range of a wireless card for the Z?
I live in an aparment complex and can pull a 40% connection to some random person\'s linksys WAP/Router that is wide open. I\'d like to use it to play with the Z\'s wireless capabilities until I can get enough together to buy my own WAP.
I was wondering if anyone came across anything regarding CF wireless card hacking, makeshift antennas, etc. that could extend the range of my card for this purpose, and maybe some wardriving in the future.
Any links, advice would help (aside from telling me to buy my own WAP!)
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Check out seatle wireless for info on antennas. Oh, and get your own access point :-)
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I looked, but didn\'t find anything groundbreaking. Maybe a few rolls of tinfoil...
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I\'m looking more for a way to interface an antenna (perhaps some sort of wire wrapping, card dismantling, etc) with the Linksys WCF12 than antenna designs/ideas/etc, if that helps at all.
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*bump*
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Aluminum foil and Pringles can:
http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/has.html (http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/has.html)
http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/cantennahowto.html (http://www.turnpoint.net/wireless/cantennahowto.html)
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/1008901 (http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/1008901)
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/2221601 (http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/columns/article.php/2221601)
http://www.wirelessgarden.com/ (http://www.wirelessgarden.com/)
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That part, I get. The question I have is how do I interface it with a CF wireless card that has no pigtail connector. Most CF cards don\'t, including my WCF12, so I was wondering how I can transmit the signal from a cantenna or similar item to my wireless card.
I\'ve searched all over and can\'t find any answers.
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So you were guest in the original post? No AP? SOL is what you are....
I use one to transmit to the city park a block away when I take my dog.
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Yep, I was guest. On my buddy\'s computer. Anyways, I couldn\'t resist picking up an AP today, so now I have one. However, I still want to try and pick up long-range, or rather longer-range signals with my Z.
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That part, I get. The question I have is how do I interface it with a CF wireless card that has no pigtail connector. Most CF cards don\'t, including my WCF12, so I was wondering how I can transmit the signal from a cantenna or similar item to my wireless card.
I\'ve searched all over and can\'t find any answers.
You could mount the CF card (and the Zaurus) at the focus point of a dish. A 2 foot dish would have a lot more gain the most of the cans do.
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That\'s definitely an idea. Do you think there would be a way to focus that signal near the zaurus through a cable? e.g. have an antenna on the roof of a car, out on a patio, etc. then have the cable focus the signal close to the Zaurus.
That would be pretty nice.
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Once upon a time I saw a web page (and it might have even been linked from the devnet) about a guy who\'d dismantled his CF wireless card and attached it to a bigger antenna, etc. I presume this is the kind of thing you\'re after. I think it might void your warranty though.
Try the devnet then a google.
Si
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A more mobile approach would be to use a compatible pc wifi card that has a built-in antennae connector with a pcmcia to cf adapter. You\'d be taking a battery performance hit with the pc card but it would allow you to enhance your reception. Actually, just the pc card\'s own antennae should give you better reception, my Samsung pc card usually shows double the signal strength of my D-Link 660. 8)
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That\'s definitely an idea. Do you think there would be a way to focus that signal near the zaurus through a cable? e.g. have an antenna on the roof of a car, out on a patio, etc. then have the cable focus the signal close to the Zaurus.
That would be pretty nice.
Such a device has been made for cell phones though the efficiency might be poor. Something like an internal antenna or coupling device connected to a cable and then to an outside antenna. If you added one of the bi-directional amplifiers ($$$) available, it could work quite well.
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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:
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Thanks for all of the ideas guys!
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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/ (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...
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I would love to know if anything comes out of your PCMCIA experiment. Keep us posted!
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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.
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what\'s a good PCcard/PCMCIA to CF adapter ?
and what\'s a good PCcard wifi card to use? preferrably 802.11g
TIA
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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!\"
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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).
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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
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Wow, VeeDub, my name, wow.....
I\'m hurt.