Wireless
| This page will be in English, so be
patient since it's not my native language. But maybe it can be
helpfull to You in Your wireless project.
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| My problem: I had bought SMC
equipment and it performed OK. After the antennas had been outside
for almost 1 year, one of them failed. New antennas are extremely
expensive here in Norway, so I took a look at "The Cantenna" project
at http://www.turnpoint.net.
I built 2 Cantennas with different cans, to maybe se a difference in
performance. I also tried building a Pringles antenna. Of the 3
the Pringles antenna performed the worst. The best was a can of
"Trondheims erter, kjøtt og flesk" which in Norway costs 29,90
(approx 3,70 US $) in a normal supermarket. The food inside is very
good also, and can be recomended for trips, maybe cooked over open
flame somewhere in the woods.... I built the second antenna and
mounted them instead of my repaired SMC antennas. And they
performed within 90% of the SMC antenna. At 1/38 of the cost :-) |
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So do not buy original antennas, build your own
Cantenna....
| Now: that was the antenna bit.
Next: I used 2 bridges from SMC (SMC 2682W) and one of them broke
down. They are extremely expensive (almost 4K nkr) so I looked at
other equipment and ways to get the same functions.
Inside the bridge, SMC have mounted a regular
PCMCIA card. I believe it to be their own 2632W card. The rest of
the electronics inside the blue box is for holding the webserver
(management interface) and some electronics to control the PCCard.
The PCCard is marked WL1100-SA. This is a OEM card used by SMC, and
the reference design is made by
Intersil and the chipset is
Prism2
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| I decided to drop the bridge
functionality to possibly save money, and insted go for something
with routerfunction. Windows2000 can be used as a router, and since
I'm a W2K kind of guy, I decided to use W2K Pro on a portable
computer I found in the back of my workshop. One Compaq Armada 1700
coming right up :-) |
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| Next was to decide what kind of Wifi
equipment to use. I bought 3 Wifi devices to play with. One 3Com
PCcard, one Zyxel Zyair B100 PCCard and one Cnet CNUSB-611 USB
device. I have read somewhere on the net, that the Cnet adapter had
a good radio implemented. The reason for buying the other 2? Well,
it looked like thw Zyxel card could be a Intersil design (based on
looking at the driverfiles) My plan was to open the cards and try to
connect an external antenna to increase the operating range. |
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| 3Com
card 3CRSHPW696 |
Cnet
CNUSB-611 device |
Zyxel
card Zyair B-100 |
 |
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| First card out: Zyxel Zyair B100. |
I
|
 |
I tried to hack this one, but
with no success. Opened it up, searched the web, found this to
be a
Prism3 based design (by
Intersil also), and tried to connect an external antenna,
but could not connect to my access point. 1 PCCard down the
drain :-( |
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| Next candidate was the Cnet
CNUSB-611 adapter. |
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I opened it up and found it to be
quite clean design and selfexplained. I used a small
screwdriver and a soldering iron and jerked of the 2 antennas
(small blue SMD antennas) marked antenna1 and antenna2 (look at
the pic.). As simple as that.
Click the picture to get it bigger |
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| Most wifi equipment has a
"diversity" switch. This device is suppose to choose the antenna
with the best signal. By removing both antennas, we make sure that
only one input (which we connect to) will be used.
The next thing was to connect an external cable
and there we are. Click the picture to se where I soldered the RG
-58 50 ohm antenna cable. Good old coaxcable (10base2) is used.
Now I installed the drivers on my laptop and tried to connect to my
AP. And we have a liftoff !! It worked like a charm. Better
signal than with the bridge, and no more linedrops which I used to
have with 2 SMC bridges. My ping time beetween the 2 sites have
also decreased a little bit.
Since this was a success, I decided to not try to
hack the 3Com card. It is also the most expensive, so I leave it
for now :-) Maybe in the spring if I get the time.
The next thing would be to try a powerhack to get
more power out of the devices. But since my 1 year old son is quite
demanding (if You have a kid, You know :-) so I have put these plans
on hold. I will update if I do this. Good luck with Your wireless
project. I hope my information cloud be of help. |
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