On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 04:12:08PM -0800, Bob Miller wrote: > > 4. Your AP needs to be in a weatherproof box if it's going to survive 24 > > hours in Oregon. > > What are good commercial sources of weatherproof boxes? Either > tiny ones for WiFi APs or bigger ones? > > I want to put some X10 equipment outside in our garden to control > lights and a pond pump, and I haven't found anything appropriate at > Jerry's. I'd probably want a box about the size of a minitower PC > case.
I don't currently have one, actually. My inital goal for the AP is to provide it with a simple indoor omni for the time being. If that works out for my immediate needs, I would probably focus future efforts on software to make it worthwhile to really consider external applications. The recommendation found at http://www.d128.com/wireless/ was to visit a store that sells electrical parts. Doesn't take long to guess where the best place here in Eugene is to look fur such things, Jerry's! =) For the moment though, I'm probably more interested applications of an antenna jack to my wireless card. We have seen that one can build reasonably good high-gain directional antennas which can be carried with you pretty cheaply. The trick is that such antennas, if carried, need to be either hand-held (useful for triangulating APs) or easily secured to ... wherever you are. Very nice camera tripods exist, though I think I could come up with something workable at a much lower price. The self-contained Pringles cantenna setup would work on a microphone table stand if you worked out a fastening solution. Other options exist - a number of years ago, a friend of mine into amatuer radio and I had devised a great little 2 meter DX setup involving lightweight tubing that could be collapsed and stored into a 3" mailing tube (remember, that's about the diameter of a Pringles can!) The thing took about 2 minutes to go from tube to transmitting, if you knew how the pieces went together and about 5 if you needed to look at a diagram. One caveat was that we determined it was necessary in anything more than a gentle breeze to pull out the bundle of clothesline cord and a fistfull of tent stakes, in order to make sure the thing wasn't toppled by the wind. A 2.4GHz setup using anything other than a primestar dish should have less mass and size, making that less of a problem. The issue is the Netgear MA401, which I managed to get open (though not without some minor cosmetic harm to the interlocking joint which keeps the plastic shroud over the tail) only to discover that the standard Prism II SMA connector hack won't work. I'll need take the clothes off my card again and feed it to a scanner to be sure, but it looks like all I need to do with it is add the RP-SMA card-edge connector, which even I could solder safely. It won't fit into the plastic housing of course, and I'll have to deal with that problem when I have the connector in front of me. I guess epoxy putty would probably work, though I'd probably want to add some blue dye to it for netgear asthetics reasons.. ;) -- Joseph Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cogito eggo sum I think therefore I am a waffle <Mercury> I'll be damned, it compiles. <Knghtbrd> Yes, but does it _run_? <Mercury> Knghtbrd: Probably until it gets to the segfault.
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