Wireless network questions

[Bill Nash]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, George Toft wrote:

> Bill Nash wrote:
> > We grabbed a couple of tripods and six foot masts from Fry's, as well.
> > When all was said and done, we had only a couple milliseconds of latency
> > at full speeds, and since one of the cans was Sour Cream and Onions, some
> > really wierd gas. The cans took the summer heat pretty well for a couple
> > of weeks. The cool thing about pringles cans is that new ones are cheap,
> > and once you build the waveguides and assemble other parts, you can keep
> > them in a drawer for when you need fast temporary link-ups.
> >
> You need to document this in a web page with drawings and pictures.
> Keep the same sense of humor.

	I had a couple of photos of the completed antennae set up, but I
can't seem to find them. I've got all my parts laying around, I guess I
could go back through the process of building one.

> One question - how did the Pringles can hold up to the rain?  I'm sure
> the Pringles would hold up well with all the preservatives, but what
> about the cardboard?  I have a sinkhole in my yard from the rain - I'm
> wondering about the cantenna.

	That's a great question. We did this last June, and after playing
around on the roof in the heat, rain would have been a nice thing to have.

	One of the other antenna designs we looked at was another shotgun
style, with a coiled load extended down the directional axis. The problem
we had (this is where our schedule 40 PVC came from, in fact) was signal
absorption by the PVC (Microwave test: If the PVC gets hot in the
microwave, it's absorbing your signal.) We were planning on some permanant
mount externals to tie our houses together (~7 miles) but never got around
to finding PVC that wouldn't eat our signal. Then I moved and it kinda
became moot.

	Overall, the Pringles cans would be best for an evening of
wardriving, parking on an elevated point and doing sweeps, or just for
purely temporary link ups. Unless you eat a lot of Pringles, in which case
you have plenty of spares. For something that can take the weather, I'm
still inclined to go with the PVC, since metal cans will rust, even here.
Sure, PVC will dry and eventually crack under the sun, but that's better
than gradual signal degradation as the can rusts. Also, your cue to
replace your antenna is when it stage dives off the roof at you.

- billn