Fry's has an Airlink 10dbi directional antenna on sale, today only. OK, you have about two hours. $9
I bought the Airlink omni (9dbi I think) and it wasn't even close to my home brew biquad. Worse yet, it didn't perform as well as the antenna in my SMC card.
snipped-for-privacy@sushi.com hath wroth:
I think it's this one:
On Sat, 11 Nov 2006 21:24:41 -0800, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :
That's an omni. The 10 dB directional antenna is
$17 here:
John Navas hath wroth:
Oops. Sloppy cut-n-paste.
Omnis have a much narrower beamwidth than a directional antenna with the same gain. For example, a 10dBi vertical omni will have a vertical -3dB beamwidth of about 30 degress. A typical 11dBi biquad will have a vertical beamwidth of about 50 degrees: |
Chuckle. Look at the numbers. One line says: Antenna Type 2.4GHz 8dBi Indoor Patch Antenna while another line says: Gain +10dBi So, is it 8dBi or 10dBi gain? Maybe they really did include the coax loss, and then changed their mind.
My guess(tm) is that there's more coax cable loss on the Airlink antenna than your home made biquad. At least you probably used fatter and better coax. The data sheet doesn't specify the coax length but I'll guess about 2m of RG-316/u coax. That's about -2.4db loss for the pigtail. That's a bit less than half your power lost in the coax. Instead of a 10dBi antenna, you have a 7.6dBi gain antenna. Specifying the antenna gain and ignoring the coax loss is in my never humble opinion borderline fraudulent advertising.
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