Omnidirectional with Directional

"elziko" hath wroth:

Yes. The easiest is with a reflector. See:

It would sorta work kinda weirdly. (How's that for an evasive answer)? The two antennas are part of a diversity receive system. How it works is rather complex so I'll spare you the explanation (unless you want it). The bottom line is that it only works correctly with two identical antennas. See the golf course case study at:

The freeantennas.com reflectors give a good directional boost, but that doesn't mean something not directly in line will disappear. The beamwidth is just not that tight. I have boosted the signal in the area that I needed it, and a few unexpected side lobes that turn out to be handy. The only location that suffers is on the back side, which is toward my neighbor, not an area where I want coverage anyway.

With an SMC router with two aerials, putting reflectors on both was best. A reflector on one and the original antenna on the other caused an odd toggling between improved an unimproved signal levels. A reflector on one and removing the other worked well.

Later, I moved to a Netgear router that only has one aerial, and used the EZ-12 windsurfer, which is supposed to be 12dBi instead of 10, and looks better.

EZ-12, Windsurfer reflector. printed on photo paper for thick stock, with aluminum foil glued to the sail, provides a substantial boost in signal.

I noticed that the Cantenna improves both directional and lateral signals over a straight wire antenna supplied by Westell.

'

Just to toss in my two bob's worth, I'm using a corner reflector on the PCI card in the back room to ping to an omni access point in the lounge and it all works extremely well.

The corner reflector is pulling 90% at 54g and the omni access point is doing the rest of the house very nicely.

I've put up some guff on the reflector.

Cheers

Rob

Consider putting your directional antenna on the client adapter you use with the new remote computer. Basically, that's what Rob is suggesting with the reflector.

There are other high gain antennas you can make or buy that could get you more than the reflectors, but the main idea in your case is: work on the client end, not the router end.

Start with a reflector and you may have enough. Won't cost much to find out.

Oh, and you can get higher gain omnis for your router. There are tradeoffs on that but it's do-able.

Steve

I've only had experience with corner reflectors and they work very well in this situation. They aren't directional to the degree that you can't pick up a decent signal in the same room without being directly in the line of fire - so its handy for laptops.

How does a canteena compare?

Rob

I made a cantenna with a USB dongle in a pair of coffee cans soldered end to end. This seemed to be the right thing to do, but it was too directional for the person that I gave it to. They preferred a single larger diameter coffee can. Less gain, but less sensitive to alignment (shooting a commercial hotspot about two blocks away).

Thanks for all the replies - I have since upgraded my firmware to DD-WRT and I see that it has the option to use the left antenna for RX and the right for TX or to swap them around. Does this sound right?

If this is the case then what I wanted to do *certainly* wouldn't work!

I will look into a refector of some sorts though.

Thanks