TechIdiots Forum

So a few days ago, I got bored and when I get bored , I get sorta creative. I decided to play with the omni antenna and gather data on my home's line of sight. For anyone who hasn't yet looked at my .kml's ,I have a STUNNING vista from my property to the south with a LOS potential for a 22 mile shot. Ahh.. perhaps one day . . .

Anywhoo, the project went like this.. I have a 6 ft omni with no POSSIBLE way of mounting on my vehicle BUT I have PVC!! and I have the radio and imagination...

I took the Warscout's rig off the van, and carried it all to the back yard..

I disconnected the directional's mast from the base frame and removed both the antenna and the radio box and set them aside.. then a threaded the omni's 6 ft lead through the van's mast then throught the main tee of the base frame and oue the end of that. There is a ball like bulge near the bottom of the omni's emitter that fit nicely into the end of the pipe. I stood it all upright, then I took the radio box and mounted that roughtly 40 Cm from one end of a roughly 1.5 meter length of the same PVC pipe and slipped all THAT ( radio box first) over the Omni itself. (Will send pics soon as I find them). I then Mounted the Vagi at the very tip of the new mast. Ohhh! I REALLY wish I hadn't misplaced the jpg's!!

First I plugged the omni into the radio and turned on stumbler... I used to only used to ping 4 or 5 AP's I gathered 18.
(Will post those files later as well)

Then I shut off the radio and changed to the vagi pointed roughly south. Took a 30 min break to guy the new tower. 28 of those minutes scrounging the lines and stakes from the kid's badminton net. 2 minutes guying the tower.

That done, I went back to 'stumbler and picked up 33 ap's! YEs, my eybrow's launched themselves completely off of my head!


New thing to learn is how to trianguate! OD find code to do it for me tee hee..

lol....I wish you the best of luck finding your eyebrows

probably same location as my pictures

maybe they reached orbit?

Nah just stuck in the documents folder.. Oh! yo mean my eyebrows??

Maybe phil can find them if he ever gets a telescope to view satellites like he wants to do

ok...I've drawn this joke on long enough

Argh! third time I try this today LOL

Pics of tower: Screen caps of results:
Broadcom only: Realtek with Vagi: Scan results to be posted later

lol...you can't get much simpler that that for a omni mount. just putting it inside a pvc...lol. Are you just switching between antennaa right now? or can you use both at the same time. The omni antenna definitely seem to work good.

on another note, it looks like I need to make the longitude textbox a little bigger...its cutting off your "g"

Jeeze a little eager to post are we andrew? lol
I will have that telescope, to make sure the MLB isn't spying on me... *shifty eyes*

Now who wants to see some dingers!

McGwire: Young Bart here is right. We are spying on you, pretty much around the clock.
Bart: But why, Mr. McGwire?
McGwire: Do you want to know the terrifying truth, or do you want to see me sock a few dingers?
Crowd: Dingers! Dingers!


Hey....why does this baseball bat have a glass zero?

well, guys, I did have results for the omni before and I haven't dug the file up yet. The omni is a 24 dBi unit.. pacific wireless I think. The results current are from the 16dBi Vagi.
I considered the loss of signal strength through the wals of that schedule 40 pipe, but even an 8dB drop doesen't bother me any. it is such a strong antenna for hobbiest/experimental use that even if I dropped it to 16dBi , it wouldn't bother me much.

I have to currently switch the antennas by swapping leads. My buddy, pingpanther, HAD been in a professional wifi installer/consultant/designer for many years and advised me not to be running antenna "arrays" on the same frequency bands at the same time without the right equipment to match phase and ect. Doing so runs the risk of feedbacks that can destroy radios. It will also distort the wave patterns.

I have researched pricing for that sort of instrumentation and it is , even surplus, WAY out of my range.

If i had a second Realtek and a USB hb, I could easily swap via software, but that is also on hold untill I get a larger enclosure.

Ultimately I would like to have my GPSr antenna and both radios in one enclosure with a powered USB hub Just waiting to have everything fall together. Have the hub I wantto use , but holding on a proper WP enclosure.

Also holding on a new 100W inverter. the Black and Decker I had bought at walmart has a dead heatsink fan, so it overheats and shuts down on a regular basis.. I figgure about a 40% cycle.

Ahh.. but I suppose like all aspects of computing, one parent process begats at least a dozen children.

Both Andrew and I have that inverter, it sucks, but cheap and works.
The ones we have the fan makes a ratteling sound for a little bit then it stops lol

WOuld be an easy fix if I could get the stupid screws loose.. crack the case, find the fan, give a little drop of sewing machine or fishing reel oil, put it all back together again, but Damnned if those screws aren't superglued in!