connecting my wifi card to my roof antenna?

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brucedeluxe169

2[H]4U
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Aug 24, 2004
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hey guys, I know this is kind of a wierd question.... but here goes anyway...

My friends and i live in a small town, and our houses are all concentrated in a small area of a few blocks around. Anyway, there are no tall structurse or anything, just small houses and we want to setup a Wi-Fi network across those blocks so we are constantly in a "lan party" :) anyway, I was wondering if there was a way to connect my Wi-Fi card to the roof antenna of my house and amplify the signal somehow... or connect it to anything really and amplify the signal. I'd love to know if there is a way to do this without buying those cheap repeator antennas, and since my roof antenna is huge and high up, I figured it would be the best place to beam out a signal.

Any idea how I could go about doing this???

Thanks guys!
 
I wouldn't waste your time. Antennas don't need to be huge, they need to be matched to the frequency you are sending/receiving on. Also, there is a ton of loss in the 2.4GHz range with coax, and the signal would be near zero by the time you got it their anyways.

The way most people would set this up is to get a cheap router, weatherproof it, and run an Ethernet cable to it on the roof. You can use PoE so you only need one cable.

Here is an example: http://www.sveasoft.com/articles/armored/
 
If the antenna you are referring to is a television antenna then don't do it. For one thing, it is tuned to television frequencies. Also, it is designed to receive, not transmit. You'd be much better off buying or building an antenna for this specific purpose. And you want to keep the cable between the antenna and the WAP as short as possible. Best way to do this is to run the ethernet up to the roof or wherever you are putting the WAP rather than run an antenna cable all that way.
 
Just in case the previous two posts havent convinced you, don't try this.

physics dictates what legnth of antennae to use for what frequency. if you get this legnth incorrect, not only will you get poor performance, you will damage your equipment due to reflecting swr's.
 
You could have your bridge in the house and run coax. You'd just have to use low loss cable, the size of which directly proportionate to the length of the run. Coax is lossy by nature but if your transmission cable run is say, 40 feet, then you'd just use LMR400 to compensate. Might even want thicker cable but generally anything 40 feet and under can be handled by 400 IF, and that's a big if, your cable is terminated well to the connectors. However if you mount an antenna outdoors not only do you have the connectors for the run, but you also have the connectors added for the lightening arrestor, something that is not optional if you want to do it correctly. Poorly crimped connectors introduce more loss than the cable typically.
 
By the reciprocity principle, you don't have antennas that work for RX and not TX.
 
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