January 2004
Intermediate to advanced
348 pages
13h 33m
English
Content preview from Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks
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49
Chapter 3, How to Hack 802.11b Antennas
Hardware Assembly Instructions for
Primestar Dish 802.11b Antenna
The Primestar antenna hack described here is the brainchild of Rob Frohne,
who details some of the steps at http://www.wwc.edu/~frohro/Airport/
Primestar/Primestar.html.
First, a little background. Primestar (a satellite TV company) was recently
purchased by DirecTV (another satellite TV company), which is phasing out
all the Primestar equipment. This means the dishes are being abandoned
and are available for other uses such as the one described here. If you can’t
locate a Primestar dish, you may be able to use a DirecTV or other satellite
TV system dish antenna. A little experimenting will be required to get them
to work. Primestar antennas can be found at tag sales, local newspaper clas-
sifieds, or on the Internet.
It is easy to transform a surplus Primestar dish into a highly directional
antenna for the very popular IEEE 802.11 wireless networking. The result-
ing antenna has about 22 db of gain (this means that the signal is amplified
in one direction about 128 times) and is fed with 50-Ohm coaxial cable.
Usually LMR400 or 9913 low-loss cable is used if the source is more than a
few feet from the antenna. (See the sidebar on low-loss cable.)
The resulting range of your wireless system using two of these antennas
with a line-of-sight
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.