Explore europe in a campervan

My latest attempt at making a high gain wi-fi antenna has been a success!

The dish part of the antenna is a vegetable steamer bought from Woolworths for around £4. I modified the steamer by drilling a hole big enough to push in the USB connector. I used the USB wi-fi adapter we already had with no modifications other than removing the plastic stand. The handle from the steamer was put in the wrong way around and is used to attach the antenna to its temporary base. The base consists of a funnel with no modifications and the top of an egg box wedged in between to make a sturdier base and assist in the vertical alignment of the dish. It currently seems like a Blue Peter project, but it does work and I will now direct my efforts into creating a sturdier base with a better alignment system!

I feed the antenna up through our roof vent as pictured above, then once I have a connection I can close the vent and the dish is left outside until I’m done with it.

I don’t have any scientific data to back-up the success of this antenna. It does allow us to get wireless internet sometimes (finding unsecured wi-fi is the tricky bit), that is more reliable than the internet we pay for in our local internet cafe! Also, when we last stayed in the free camping aire in La Rosiere I couldn’t get any wi-fi signal using my normal antenna, but once I plugged in this high gain antenna I could get a signal from a village around 3 km away on a neighbouring mountain! It was a secured connection though so I couldn’t vouch for the quality of the internet connection.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm and is filed under Campervan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.