How-To: Build a WiFi biquad dish antenna – Engadget – www.engadget.com
Wireless enthusiasts have been repurposing satellite dishes for a couple years now. This summer the longest link
ever was established over 125 miles using old 12 foot and 10 foot
satellite dishes. A dish that big is usually overkill for most people and modern mini-dishes work just as well. The
dish helps focus the radio waves onto a directional antenna feed. We’re building a biquad antenna feed because it
offers very good performance and is pretty forgiving when it comes to assembly errors. Follow along as we assemble the
feed, attach it to a DirecTV dish and test out its performance.
Why? With just a handful of cheap parts, a salvaged DirecTV dish and a little soldering, we were able to detect
access points from over 8 miles away. Using consumer WiFi gear we picked up over 18 APs in an area with only 1 house
per square mile.
Build an all-weather outdoor WiFi access point for $50 – Engadget – www.engadget.com
Okay, the $50 in that headline is actually just for the box you’ll put this in, not for the AP, wires or other
equipment, but it’s sure a lot less than you’d pay for a custom ruggedized enclosure, right (and we did get your
attention, didn’t we)? However, Dan Santillan has put together great step-by-step guide that’ll have you
extending your wireless network out to the pool, tennis courts and golf course (or at least that’s what it’ll
accomplish at the Engadget Mansion, anyhow). All you need is a a WiFi router (such as a reprogrammed
Linksys WRT54G), a juicy amplifier
(which may or may not violate FCC rules; Dan basically says it “is still within the 2.4ghz ISM band but not the way
wi-fi band was allocated�?), and a little elbow grease. Oh, and Dan says he bought the box in a “local electrical
store,�? but considering that he’s based in Saudia Arabia, YMMV in tracking down a similar one (though we suspect it
still won’t be too hard to find).
Kyocera KR1 EV-DO router reviewed – Engadget – www.engadget.com
For a while, it looked like the lime-green
Junxion Box had the instant access
point market to itself. But it’s got some competition from Kyocera and D-Link, which have come out with their own
mobile routers. Like the Junxion Box, the D-Link DI-725
and Kyocera’s KR1 let you roll your own WiFi hotspot via a PC EV-DO card. In fact, the DI-725 and KR1 look suspiciously
alike; both were developed by D-Link, and the main difference appears to be that the DI-725 is being sold directly to
consumers, while the KR1 is being sold through cellular carriers. Network Computing gave the KR1 a try, and found it to
be an easy, reliable way to create a quick-and-dirty ad-hoc network. Setup proved to be simple and straightforward,
though the reviewer found it difficult to gauge signal strength, as there’s no external or software-based indicator.
And while the EV-DO connection was fast enough for web browsing, the review cautioned against trying to use it for
real-time applications like VoIP (of course, the same could be said for standalone EV-DO as well).
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