pointing wireless signal

My question is, I'm building a directional antenna for my orinoco card and I want to use it on top of a hill aways from my house My AP doesn't directional antennas only regular ones but will the directional still work or does the AP need one too? thank you.

kaltag said:

My question is, I'm building a directional antenna for my orinoco card and I want to use it on top of a hill aways from my house My AP doesn't directional antennas only regular ones but will the directional still work or does the AP need one too? thank you.

Click to expand...

i would say that it would be wise to use directional antennas on both of the access point and the card. if you only use one for the card, you will probably have a bad receive signal and maybe a decent send. if you do both, it should do well for the send/receive on both ends. but if you are going with some of the home made directional antennas, it's something you are just going to have to try and see if it works... there just isn't really any guarantee that it will work for xx feet...

you going the pringle can route?

Improving one side of your radio link with a "better" antenna will help you with your overall link quality.

Even if the AP antenna is an omni, when you improve the effective gain (the amount of gain that is pointed in the right direction) you improve the Effective Isotropic Radio Power - translated = works better.

For example (this is from a Cisco bridge range calculation spreadsheet for Cisco BR350s), two AP units, 5 mw each, 20 ft of cable, both with a 5.2db omnidirection antenna = MAX DISTANCE about .3 Km.

Switch just one of the omnidirectional antennas for a 13.8db Yagi (directional) antenna, and the MAX DISTANCE goes up to .8 Km.

If you got geeky-serious about this, and used a 21db dish antenna instead of the Yagi (still using the original omnidirectional on the one AP) you would get you a MAX DISTANCE of 1.9 Km.

thank you for your input. As Stated the only way to REALLY know is to try it but unfortunately the bulkhead n type connector i need isn't available in this STATE so I have one on the way that'll arrive on thursday so maybe then we can try

Idaho, eh? Are you a native Spud?

I'm an old Mud Laker, myself. (West of Rexburg about 30 minutes).

not native but might s well be. Moved here when I was 6 (19 now)