"Brian McCabe" <briansmccabe@gmail.com> hath wroth:

>I am wondering, with regards to the linksys wrt54g v5's antennae: is
>one antenna assigned for reception and the other assigned for
>transmission? If I were to build an antenna, I am not sure which I
>would need to connect it to. Would I need to build two?

No. The antennas are switched to form a diversity receive system to
eliminate frequency selective fading in a reflective environment.
Grossly over-simplified, the receiver selects the best antenna for a
given client and uses only that antenna for the client. The same
antenna is used for xmit. If the receiver starts to collect data
errors and noise, it then tries the other antenna to see if there is
an improvement. Diversity reception offers considerable improvement
in reception reliability in a highly reflective indoor environment.

Heavy reading:
<http://www.commsdesign.com/design_corner/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=16500279>
<http://www.commsdesign.com/design_corner/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=16501888>
<http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk722/tk809/technologies_tech_note09186a008019f646.shtml>

If you were to build a high gain antenna, it would connect only to one
of the antenna ports. You will need to either remove or disable the
other antenna. The problem is that a random client radio MIGHT
connect to the wrong antenna. You may get rotten performance until
the access point decides to switch antennas. This effect both breaks
the benifits of diversity reception and sometimes offers even worse
performance. See the case study in the Cisco article above on the
golf course for details.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@comix.santa-cruz.ca.us
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558