Thursday, September 18, 2003

Use a Surplus Primestar Dish as an IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networking Antenna

Use a Surplus Primestar Dish as an IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networking Antenna

Primestar was recently purchased by Direct TV who
is phasing out all the Primestar equipment. This means that the dishes are
being trashed, and are available for other uses such as the one I describe
here. It is easy to make a surplus Primestar dish into a highly directional
antenna for the very popular IEEE 802.11 wireless networking. The resulting
antenna has about 22 db of gain, 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. The range using two of these antennas with a line of sight
path is around 10 miles at full bandwidth. I must stress the line of sight
part though. Leaves really attenuate the signal.


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