The Home build WiFi Project.

[Saxon]

The Home build WiFi Project.

Part 1

I am writing this the first part of a short series of articles for Tech Forums. In this part one I am going to cover the
what is available to the home builder at the moment, the second one is going to cover what ones I have come up with and that is as far ahead as I can think of now.

The Cantenna.

This is by far the most common type of external home made antenna I have seen around liverpool university halls of residence I have seen loads of them, I mean loads All handily pointing to the Uni's free wifi hot spot that is shockingly supposed to be for students only but is not protected by a password. This has become so popular because the materials are so available,
Pringles cans and Tin cans are available to us all.
This is the best Cantenna How to I have seen.
This shows what can be done with a Cantenna.
Lego MindStorms Steerable Cantenna Tripod.(youtube)
A good example of a Cantenna. (youtube)

WokFi.

This is very interesting and covers what you can do with some cheep USB adapters and ethnic cookware, All you need to do is put it together. Apparently the Chinese frying scoops that are the 11 - 12 inch size are nearly perfect parabolic dishes. Apparently you can get a 12-15dB gain using one of these things enough for a LOS range extension to 3-5km.
The original page. (WARNING HEAVY USE OF PICTURES).
A Instructables on WokFi

Sieve WiFi Aeria
This looks like a more traditional dish that is based on the WokFi, it is one of the larger home built dishes, it is also able to be made with 2-3 hours it would be hard to justify this for use on the side of your house unless you are a hard core amateur.
Sieve WiFi Aeria


OK that is is for the mod's But I wont stop there, To test a signle from network you have detected you can use the standard windows XP wireless utility but that is a little on the basic side Net Stumbler is far better as it allows you to test the signal strength to noise ratio and it allows you to add a GPS device to allow you to record the location of access point an also filter you search results by ssid, secured and un-secured,ect, ect. And finally for your
router HOW TO MAKE A WIFI EXTENDER (youtube)

I hope to have the second article ready in the next few weeks so please stay tuned.

Discuss Part 1 here: Discussion: The Home build WiFi Project.
See Part 2 HERE