Well I'm pretty sure these signal boosters for cell phones are a scam. But the idea behind them is that the people designing the antennas for your cell phone made some error in the radiation pattern. That is they thought you'd hold the phone at 30 deg and the tower would be at 10 deg when you're 300 ft or more away, but in fact it's at 5 deg and you hold your phone at 33.4 degrees and so the radiation pattern should be more more focused in that area. But these chips don't have the advantage of being direct radiators and it's questionable their assumptions are any better than the cell phone manufacturers.
In our case however you can extend the range 50-200% by selecting the right antenna. You can even calculate exactly how much stronger your signal will be with the dBi numbers. You're best bet is to draw the area in question and see how much of the area will be in the 3dB cone, how much in 6dB etc. Then draw radiating circles for atmospheric loss. You can do this for various antennas and figure out how to cover the greatest useful area with the whatever signal strength and noise floor you have. You can safely assume that with standard PRISM2 card there should be a 20dB margin, for ORiNOCO 12dB, and Cisco 9dB. You can connect with less, but these will give you a good dependable connection. You can look at what kind of margin you get with your AP's built in antennas, and assume it gives you a 2-3 dBi gain. Use iwconfig in Linux; I think Netstumber gives the numbers in Windows. I think typicaly you start out with a 30dB margin, but I've seen the margin at 60dB with a 100mW AP with a 21dB antenna. It depends on ambient noise in addition to the quality of the equipment. I can't vouch for how accurate those readings are either, some cards seem more dependable than others. I think the popular ORiNOCO card gives good numbers though. Superpass probably has the greatest variety of antennas at low cost that you can order directly. Look through the nycwireless archives for other antenna makers as well. There is someone else with the cheapest omni's and dbiplus(poynting) has some cheap yagi's if you buy in bulk. -- Daniel On Thu, 19 Sep 2002, Jon Baer wrote: ]Does anyone know if items like this: ] ]http://www.thesignalbooster.com/ ] ]Would work for 80211? ] ]- Jon ] ]-- ]NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ ]Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ ]Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/ ] -- <<You cant eat before a operashun. Not even cheese.>> -- Charlie Gordon -- NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/ Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/ Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
