Get WiFi Antenna: Building Your Own

"Wi-Fi" or 802.11x(IEEE standard for wireless LAN setup), has become the most popular worldwide standard for the wireless communication in LAN..Nowadays work is being done to make various devices like mobile phones, mp3 players etc to be wi-fi enabled.

In order to enhance the wireless capabilities the antennas are developed and available in the market, though they are easy to install but these antennas are very expensive. But it is also possible to design and make our own antennas from very cheap and readily available things like cans, wires etc.

Firstly we need a can, which can be of soft drinks, coffee cans, etc. But care must be taken that the can selected for making the antennas should have a smooth surface else a rough surface would produce distortions in the wireless signals. Also longer cans are preferable since it can have a better reception of signals. So the selection of proper kind of can is important in order to design a smooth working wi-fi antenna.

We would also require various connectors like N-type Female Chassis-mount connector, which help in connecting the cable to the antenna.In order to attach the connector to the can we would need to solder on the wire, nuts and bolts of connectors, we would also need to find out an optimal place to solder the connector to the cable.

For the ones who always try to develop things in a different way, we provide an alternate design, different from one which was built by can. Instead of the can we can buy other things( which are also comparatively cheaper) like small, thumb-shaped USB wireless dongle; a TypeA-to-TypeA, male-to-female

USB extension cable of enough length; and a mesh-covered dish, such as a wok, sieves, steamers, discarded DirecTV dishes, or mesh-covered umbrellas.

Next what we need to do is to connect USB dongle to the top of the mesh-covered dish,and one end of the cable to the dongle, and the other end to your wireless device.Since the Wi-fi communication is directional, what is left is to just focus the dish towards the source of the wi-fi signal, a point from where the signals are getting transmitted.

Advantages of designing our own antennas:

The construction of our own antennas provides various advantages to us. Apart from being cheaper than the antennas available in market they are also easy to configure into our system. So instead of investing huge amounts of money in antennas we can better manage that money by adding them to buy better Laptop systems.

There is also time factor involved in making our own antennas system. Since it is easy and faster to make and install our own antennas, it saves lot of time.Hence designing and making our own antennas would provide a better facility to the total cost involved in configuring the communication system.