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Beyond Pringles: 802.11 Antenna From A Floppy Disk
real gumby writes "Shades of E.E. "Doc" Smith! Thomas Gee has made an 802.11 antenna from an old floppy disk and a paper clip. He credits this site for the inspiration (featuring an antenna from an old ice cream spoon). As MacPlus comments: "It's stylish, effective, and doesn't detract from that `everything computing' ambience in your home."" Warning: French. Update: 06/07 18:27 GMT by T : (Not Fremch ;))
... No wonder I can't understand a word. It's in 'Fremch'.
Warning: Fremch !! Beware!!
Reminds me of the RH8.0 install, was doing one today and noticed a package that was apparently to support "Brisish English"...
I had a hard enough time finding one floppy to make into an Enterprise, and now I have to find another one to make an antanae. Where will the madness end?
Warning: Fremch
I'm so sick of these misspellings. It's supposed to be "Freedom" you illiterate git.
* This post brought to you by the 2003 "The Flag Sure Is Purty Act". *
--saint
Just when I throw all my old floppies away and start stocking up on Pringles Spicy Cajun cans I find out I didn't have to eat all those chips or throw away those disks. /. is just too slow at getting the news out ;-)
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
the last thing the article says is that its not going to work...
Makes me want to build my own 802.11 antenna out of an old phone, a Speak n spell, a record player, a bent fork, and some string.
From reading Slashdot, I've come to understand that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who see everything as it might relate to 802.11 antennae, and those who don't.
Babelfish
Hope the link works for you. Read English, right?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
MacGyver is alive and well and living in Paris.
a world in progress...
With it already /.ed, it looks like he was serving the site with that thing...
:)
I can smell the smolding plastic and paperclips etc...
This thread made me use up all my floppies, sadly.
just add porn.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
why they dont just get it over with and just use paperclips.
Each year, thousands and thousands of floppies get thrown away, as their owners switch to CD-R's and memorysticks. Most of them sadly end up in garbage dumps and incenerators, never to be seen again. We at the Floppy Disk Rescue Center care. Every day, we provide a new home and, quite often, a new life as a toy or a scinece project, for tens and hundreds of old floppies. This may be just a tiny drop of water in the sea, but with your help, we can make a difference. For more information about the locations of our Centers, just call 1-800-FLOP.
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
I'm having trouble unfolding my trombones, can anybody help me?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
This whole 802.11 home brew stuff is pretty interesting. I live less than a mile away from a buddy of mine and have been kicking around the idea of setting up our own little wireless lan using something like this (doubt I'll be building the antenna out of floppies though).
Ran across this: Reach Out and Touch Someone. Warning: Engmish!
One of the funniest things about the aricle is him going door to door offering to pay for DSL service to get help with the expirement. Most people turned him down! Show's how paranoid and distrustfull we've become (not surprising)... And man if he'd been caught peeping around at houses with his binoculars or telescopes! The big problem I have is that it took him $1400 to get it going. Seems like it could be done way cheaper to me.
If you don't have something nice to sig, then don't sig anything at all.
Fremch is what you learn AFTER French, but you can only take it during Period 6 & 9...
If you don't have something nice to sig, then don't sig anything at all.
MacGyver torrents
-Russ
Me
So thats how Macgyver gets his Centrino lappy to work anywhere in the world.
It's much simpler than the Pringles can yagi, and to top that off, it delivers a much higher gain.
A bit more OT. Did you know that the Linksys WAP54G access point is based on Linux?. Somewhat strange, that there are no linux drivers for Broadcom 802.11g wireless NICs.
/Styx
A floppy and a paperclip? That must mean it has to be a Mac floppy drive.
That I used to make a Bong with back in High school.....back in my whacky weed days :-D
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"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire
> It was the French who were doing business with Iraq during the embargo. It was the French who gave Iraqi leaders passage out of Iraq during the war.
Would you mind substantiating your opinion with facts? Real facts, not plausible, but absolutely unfounded might-be-might-nots, like the invisible weapons of mass destruction.
> The USA is a country founded on freedom
No longer.
> The USA is a world leader
> and we will continue to be a world leader
The United States' militant insistence on that is the cause for much of the world's current woes. If the US so desperately need to triumph and celebrate themselves, i see no problem with it; but please do it at home and leave the world at peace.
You have fallen to a misconception... nobody envies the US' wealth, but many fear the US' meddling. The open aggressiveness, the readiness to ignore international treaties and conventions, war, bombs, foreign intelligence, you get the picture.
Sebastian
The easiest and highest-gain 802.11 antennas to build are of the waveguide + horn variety. Horns can easilly get you as much as 12-16 dB additional gain over just a waveguide (e.g. Pringles can).
For example, check out this horn build from cardboard and aluminum foil.
Yagis and other antenna element arrays are just too tough to build right, especially without a SWR meter. At 802.11 frequencies, just go horn. Save the Yagi's for lower frequencies, like 10MHz, where a horn would be nuts.
How to make your floppy drive into a WiFi Access Point. First, put in a linux floppy distro and load... oh wait, the antenna is stuck in there...
Nevermind...
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.