I'm searching for some outdoors 2.4ghz antennas (parabolic or grid) so that I can hook up a wireless LAN between my place and my sisters place a street away.. I've googled, searched Yellowpages and all the other crap but can't find any shops online in Brissy that sells the gear - so any ideas?

Cheers

umart

RFShop will sell you something useful. Theyre in Oxley and pretty easy to find.

last edited by trillion at 20:47:30 10/Sep/06

if you're bored you could always try free antennas and make your own like I did but haven't been able to actually test it yet with my friend up the road so don't actually know the range of it but it does improve the signal in my own house.

Techtopia have some decent ones.

But I would strongly recommend DLink's ANT24-1500 antenna - we have five of them which we use for schools/educational events along with DWL-2100APs (we'll be upgrading most of these to DWL-3200APs this year for more power).

What sort of range do u get out of the wireless?

Depends on the location of the base unit, whether you have wood walls, brick walls, whether there's tinfoil insulation inside your walls (like I have) which REALLY reduces the range of the thing. If I stick my router up on top of my roof with a 12v battery it reaches pretty damn far, haven't checked the exact distance but I'm guessing it'd reach a street away. I also have the ability to up the wattage on my transmitter so that helps if your router also has that ability.

For any serious connection speeds though you'll quite probably need direct line of sight and an outdoor directional antenna though I'm no expert so I don't really have a clue what I'm talking about.

strongly recommend DLink's ANT24-1500 antenna

1400's are $209 at umart somehow I don't think he's going to want to spend any serious amounts of money on antennas just to hook up to his sisters' house, though I guess I could be wrong. The 1400 has a 3KM range too.

Well... they claim a 3km range.

Keep in mind you also have to consider the output power of the Access Point.
A DWL-2100 outputs at 20mW, which is 8dB. By the time you add cable loss, you're at about 5dB - kinda a waste when you hook it up to a 15dB antenna.

The DWL-3200 on the other hand is 100mW. That's 23dB. Remove cable loss and it's about 20dB. To not cool the antennas and end up with signal reflection, you'll need to reduce the output power ont eh 1500 to about 80%. But even with that I'm not confident we'll get 3km out of them. We couldn't get the 2100s talking 800 meters because of trees. Remember, trees will kill your signal.

I'm connected using my tin cantenna right now. Works fine, cost me ~$20 in parts.

I am looking in the $80-120 mark for an antenna - I've read up on the ex-payTV/Galaxy grid antennas and there seems to be quite a few people using these for WLAN.

The D-Link is probably just a smidgen out of the price range, although I did find some nice gear on RFShop.

Thanks for the info on the dB loss and what-not Raven, I hadn't considered the problems I might run into in that area. The AP at one end is a Linksys WRT54G (Alchemy firmware) which I believe can push the power output upto 200mW which should be enough to get down to my sisters. The other end will be a PCI/PCMCIA card with the aerial plugged into it.

My understanding of the WRTG54G is that it was designed for 50mW, people push it to 100mW though but it gets hot. I could be wrong, but if what I've heard is correct, you will want it actively cooled at 200mW.