Testing Antenna Distances

Hi People

Ok friends and I are currently testing the range of WiFi antennas. Today we drove to the beach and with the use of a car inverter I drove round with my USR9106 AP connected to a D-Link 18db Omni antenna. Mobile Access Point

Test weather conditions: High Winds, Slightly raining, Bloody cold

With the AP connected to the antenna I stood holding the aerial while a friend in his car drove down the beach with Net Stumbler on his laptop, watching the signal strength.

He got 1.2 km from me before he lost the signal, then on the return trip it wasn’t until he got within 0.5 km that he picked up the access point signal again.

Other things that influenced the distance that he could pick up the signal was the direction the antenna was held. The less I wobbled (shivering my ass off) the antenna while I was holding it the further he could go before he lost the signal.

We plan to test the range of antennas, connecting via a yagi antenna to the AP, the range of a WiFi USB device to the AP and a parabolic dish to the AP.

Just letting people know what we are doing in case you’re interested. We plan on taking a digital camera to take photos next time.

Btw holding a 1.2m Omni antenna above your head at the beach in one hand, with a cell phone in the other does look a little stupid and you do get strange looks from people driving by.

Joe

Heh, I go war walking with laptop and a 15 db parabolic on the pram.. and yeah.. a few funny looks.

What card/aerial etc is in the laptop?

Should get your mate to walk witht he laptop it's warmer.

I don’t know what kind of card he has in his laptop but it can’t support an external antenna. But this is the kind of user we are testing our AP for (Roaming laptop/PDA users).

For dedicated users we are going to test connections between USB WiFi, Parabolic Dish, and Yagi antennas to the Omni antenna. But my mates don’t have cards in there laptops that support the adding of an external antenna. We can’t make a hash job by adding our own antennas to the laptops because they are hired out (Well we could but I doubt that the company would be very receptive when we handed them back).

We took photos of the skyline and identified all the high points that would be likely to support antennas, overlaying this with topographic maps and aerial survey photos we are identifying distances that can be covered and the optimum positions of Omni antennas. This also helps to identify WiFi black spots (or at least reduce the size of them).

If people ask just say your trying to pin point the location of a source of radiation and you watch them back off

And we are still waiting for it to warm up down here..