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Who Needs a Satellite Dish When You Have a Wok?
An anonymous reader writes "Why pay $20,000 for a commercial link to run your television station when a $10 kitchen wok from the Warehouse is just as effective?
This is exactly how North Otago's newest television station 45 South is transmitting its signal from its studio to the top of Cape Wanbrow, in a bid to keep costs down."
But can I receive it with a bit of tinfoil?
Is a wok parabolic in cross section or is it circular?
More to the point, why pay to watch "45 South" when I can, more cheaply, scoop my eyeballs out with a rusty spoon from Honest Al's Hardware store.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
While I applaud his nerdyness, check the following: The Wok replaced the dish, which "the same size as a wok, were $80". So, the price of the dish of $80 has been replaced with a cheaper part for $10.
Then: "We have spent a lot of time getting it right -- the first time we installed one we had it up a pole with the handle still on the end of the wok [...]".
So the $20,000 and the Wok are purely sensationalism on part of the press.
Can you somehow add a ball point pen and chewing gum into making the dish?
MacGyver would just love that!
If the wok thing becomes more popular here, one or many of the following is bound to happen:
1. Prices of Wok will increase NOT due to increase in demand, but because sellers now think it serves a dual purpose.
2. FCC will jump in the bandwagon and demand wok makers put a minute dent to make sure it does not serve as a dish.
3. Homeland Security will jump on the FCC bandwagon and demand that woks be classifed as potentially "interesting" and "dangerous" weapons.
4. Carlyle Group will do a LBO against the largest Wok maker...Cheney will be richer.
5. Canada will impose a "musician's duty" on Woks since woks can be used to transmit pirated music...
that's all i can think of now.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
...and now the image quality is more like...err...sweet and sour? or: what about the signal being chopped? (that one takes a second more) duh.
You can't use a $20,000 commercial link to whip up a tasty and healthy stir-fry. There's a lot of value in that $10 wok.
"People wanted to know all the details about how to make their own, so it is now all publicly documented," he said. Can anybody provide a link to the 'American website' - he can't mean
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Yep the 10$ wok replaced 80$ of antenna which I presume is NZ dollars which is £0.35 or $0.70 a pop so you have spent all day frigging with a second rate solution to save £20 ish which I don't think realy floats evn in in NZ. The other think is that this is going via computer to computer so it's most likely a 2.4GHz WIFI + Canntenna mission which I hoped had been done to death. Even I've done 3Km between my car with a router and a Coffee can and a USB stick strapped to a mates Van Window. Old hat!!At least I got to drink the coffee :)
As long as you make it the right shape, there's no reason why a tinfoil dish wouldn't do the job too.
You should see how thin some dishes on real satellites are.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
In the past, people have also used those circular snow sleds as the basis for building a dish antenna.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Else the wok rusts out and they're off the air!
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog. ListAll&friendID=1367077&MyToken=475181f8-fcd7-4f5 c-90a5-575f044e6fc4ML
IT's about halfway down the page.
So, basically, depending on how much "a lot of time" is, they may have even made a loss? Time literally _is_ money when an employee or two are doing it. You pay salaries for that time. So having someone figure out the focal point, the mounting, build some contraption to hold the LNB in the right place, etc, can end up costing more than $70 quite easily.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I want to hire the guy who thought about this and implemented it. Well, I wish...
:)
I work at a Big Company, where over-engineering, paying 10k where 1k would do, and endless discussion on the color of the bikeshed happen thrice before lunch every day.
I became an engineer because of McGuyver... how disappointed I am with reality
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
TV by wok, eh?
Reminds me of the tasty and very useful Pringles antenna.
Geeks and their obsession with food...
What's next? A pizza box server? (no wait... scratch that)
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
...I want to cook up some chicken stir fry and watch telly at the same time?
If you would have read the whole article, you'd know that 20,000 is the price the TV station would have had to pay for a commercial solution.
The reflector does a couple of thing. The most obvious is that it catches the signal and focuses it on the antenna. The bigger the dish and the closer it is to a parabola, the more signal to the antenna. The other thing it does is to shield the antenna from noise. The antenna in the article seemed to be nested right inside the wok. So, the wok probably improves the signal to noise ratio (SNR) by at least double and maybe by a factor of three or four (or more if it's done right). That's very important. If your signal to noise ratio is good enough, you can use amplification to get the signal you need. If the SNR isn't good enough, then almost nothing helps.
The wok will give a useful increase in signal strength but a more significant improvement in signal to noise ratio.
But do they use a preferred wok supplier?
Nothing witty
This post has nothing to do with TFA, but I couldn't resist my urge any longer. Can somebody please come up with some pseudo-useful reason for Slashdot's "tagging" feature? For the love of god I can't understand what good they are. Yours, "yes-no-maybe-haha"
And this is not exactly new, mack in the 1970's we used to use $7 snow sleds to pirate HBO.
I used to install C band residential satellite dishes and we used a radar detector mounted in the front of a wok to measure microwave interference from ground towers when evaluating customer installation locatations.
you forgot...
... thus subtly destroying the entire Chinese DVD cloning industry
7. The RIANZ and MPANZ will demand the mandatory inclusion of the broadcast flag on all woks world wide.
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
I've got a wireless link (11g) set up between two Linksys routers. At one end, I've put a spider skimmer behind the antenna; it's one of those Chinese cooking tools used to pick items out of a deep fryer. Near-perfect parabola, wire mesh of 6-8mm, bamboo handle; ideal reflective surface for a 2.4GHz signal.
I get about +12dB gain with the "dish" installed; not bad for £5.
xkcdsw: the unofficial archive of Making xkcd Slightly Worse
The main idea is to create a reflector. For even cheaper version You can also use cardboard+aluminum foil or as a reflector. Even a straight object like frying pan will boost the signal a bit. Although it won't be directed to the place you are expecting... it will work after some adjustements of the position.
Xatrix Security - Computer Security news portal
> Wok this way
/ wokwm2007/index.php
We already had that at the Wok World-Championship: http://tvtotal.prosieben.de/tvtotal/show/specials
A friend of mine is from New Zealand. They are fiercely independent and patriotic people, much like Mr. Chekov in Star Trek (everything was done first or better in Soviet Union, remember?). Well, the Kiwi's may even have a valid claim on the first Powered Flight. Though Mr. Pearce never claimed to have flown first because he didn't achieve a controlled landing.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
When you start cooking on your 20.000 dollar network kit things get interesting for the real nerds....
why use a 10$ wok if you can use a 20.000$ network dish.
Who Needs a Wok When You Have a Satellite Dish?
Just a little bit more expensive.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
From TFA:
He discovered satellite dishes were between $100 to $400 retail and that smaller dishes, the same size as a wok, were $80. Mr Jones thought he could do better. Along with friend Murray Bobbette they worked out mathematical equations to prove the curved metal face of a wok would have the same effect as a small satellite dish.
So basically they've grown their own wireless solution, using woks. However, instead of spending ages working out mathematical equations and using trial and error, they could have bought the $80 dish and be done with it. Hence the grandparent post's point stands. Saving $20k by spending a few days developing a wireless solution is cool, but for a real world application, saving $60 on that wireless system to use a wok instead of a dish that will likely have years of development behind it is fairly silly. Like someone else has said, what about when the wok starts to rust?
Maybe if you're going to point the finger at people for not reading TFA, you should read TFA.
Can this actually be considered a satellite transmitter as it is only beaming signal to a receiver on top a hill?
Gentle reader,
I see that you have picked up on the meaning of "TFA." Here is a new acronym for you to study: "FAQ."
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
...and now the image quality is more like...err...sweet and sour? or: what about the signal being chopped?
How about: "I know I just watched the show an hour ago, but I'm hungering to see it again."?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Does it run linux?
...and after watching once, people feel the need to tune back in an hour later.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
My mom owned a three woks and I often wondered why she needed so many. Who knew she was an undercover techie ?
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
nzherald really seems to rock: Strange but true...
However, I am not sure where the dividing line is for the new wave of semi-automatic transmissions.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Scousers (those from the area of Liverpool) have been calling satellite dishes 'Woks' since the 1980s - "'as 'e gorra wok on the wall?" - I'm surprised it hasn't been tried this way round before before!
As if millions of Slashdotters all cried out in unison, "Hey, I gotta try that!"
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Wow, not only can it cook up a good stir-fry but it can also make a satellite dish.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
It wokked right with a lot a work!
What was the original sig?
If you aren't far left by the age of 18 you have no heart. If you aren't far right by 30 you have no brain.
However, I am not sure where the dividing line is for the new wave of semi-automatic transmissions.
I would expect them to be classified as automatic as a semi-automatic is just a different implementation below the interface.
If you read a speed reading book, does it take you less time to read the second half?
"A group of us wanted to connect our computers to each other and then we wokked out a way to get of getting the signal between two points," he said.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
So... a curved bit of metal can function well as a curved bit of metal? I've got a flat bit of metal here. Wonder if I can use it as some kind of plate?
you can use a wokkie-tokkie
Bert
Just Funny? At couple of those points are actually pretty insightful, someone hand the parent some karma, please.
That just confirm that when companies invest billion in development, that also means that there are hiring incompetent people and we the consumer pay the price of those bad choices
man this guy is great, whish that we could have another INTELLIGENT guy to provide us with a cheap way to make our electricity like our own personal wind generator
I saw guy on TV the other day who visited the Amazonian jungle, and he said that this is more or less how the local people there watch the World Cup.
Typical the silly chimpanzee Antenna gets all the attention yet the important part is the fact that some bunch of yokels got off there arse and actualy did somthing for them selves. The WOKFI thing is nothing but the TV station is quite a feat and I'm suitably impressed. Hopefully that might inspire someone to do something similar in their area. By the way the CCC have even made their own DVB-T station which you can buy so it's not all that impossible ...best of luck all
e ws/southtv_300107_56k.asx
http://images.tvnz.co.nz/tvnz_video/windows/one_n
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/
Who needs a puny wok when you have a C-band satellite dish. Aww yeah.
"Wocka Wocka Wocka." -Fozzie
I hope 45 South doesn't transmit pron cause it's Not Safe for Wok.
... isn't that close enough?
Dude. Way too much text for a bad pun.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Yes, woks can be good enough approximations of parabolic cross section. /. have featured a few time ago an article about using wok colanders as dishes for Wifi USB dongles, and a several techniques to check is the parabolic approximation is good enough.
/. article " 4km WiFi Range w/ $5 DIY Antenna ". TFA is mostly the same idea but applied to a different signal in the same GHz range (microwaves).
And in fact, because of the wave-leght of TV, WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.. (signals in the GHz range have centimetric wave-lengths) their corresponding colanders too can be used as cheap antennas, and have the aditionnal benefit of having holes (they are basically metallic mesh) and therefore having less friction against winds (and lower risk of being blown away during a storm).
- one technique, which can be done in the shop before buying the colander, is to use a small chain whose shape when suspended at both end and check if shapes match (checking if the shape is "catenary")
- another is to cover the colander in aluminium foil and checking if a parallel light source (the sun) converge to one single point (where the USB dongle should go once everything assembled)
See
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I have a couple of DSS dishes, the round kind, not the old primestar type. Does anyone know of a site with a good 2.4GHz antenna design based on them? Pref. with a biquad?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/
Can watchers in the area tell us if it really woks?
I think they designed that website with a wok! It's been a while since I've seen a website that hard to read.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
It's an uplink to be exact. They are sending the signal from the station to a transmitter/ repeater system (uplinking the output to the distribution system). In the states its known as a STL (Studio to Transmitter Link). Too bad the FCC would probably fine the crap out of any station that tried that here.
CompUSA has wok antenae too. But they're made by Belkin. And they're gold plated.
I tried using a wok for a satellite dish before, but the only channel I could get was the Food Network. Seriously, pirating satellite TV is bad, m'kay.
It's a very dark ride.
Perhaps all those Virgin Media customers will still be able to get Sky One after all, using just a wok from the kitchen?!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This is the effect you see with thin foils in a microwave oven, and has led to the extremely popular misconception that you can't put metal into a microwave. With a minimal bit of observation anyone will see that the entire microwave enclosure IS metal and reflects the microwaves just fine without significant absorption. The only problem is with thin foils which are incapable of efficiently reflecting the microwaves.
I haven't calculated how efficiently tin-foil might reflect the high power radio waves mentioned here, but wouldn't put money either way without checking. (I haven't yet read the fine article, so I don't even know what power levels we're talking about).
has just confirmed they are releasing the new iWok which will be followed by the educational offering the eWok.
Why not buy one of the myriad of old sat. dishes on ebay? Someone else already spent the money on the parabolic mold and put a reflective coating on the surface.
...you'll be hungry for more bandwidth in an hour.
Interested in doing your own experimentation at 10GHz and up but don't own a TV station yourself?
Try reading about it here or here.
When will this story die... it's been duped all over the place multiple times. It's just not that interesting... Homebrew hacker concocts device that saves 1000$s over commercial solution, ad infinitum.
Only $999.99
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Now I'm hungry reading this article, you insensitive clod!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
The article makes the same mistake, so I don't blame the editors.
The dish in question is part of a terrestrial point-to-point link. It's not a satellite dish, since satellites aren't involved.
One would hope that the $20k version includes the microwave transceiver - but yeah, I have made my fair share of home brew antennas and they generally work better than the carelessly made factory ones. Using a wok is a good idea - nice and sturdy.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
TFA says he's a 45 South Volunteer. So I don't think "time is money" is particularly true in this case.
I also have a feeling that 45 South will be a "community" type station (given that there isn't really a major centre anywhere in North Otago, and that they have volunteers working for them) and that they'd probably much prefer spending time than money.
Would Teflon coating make any difference to this, or does the wok need to be polished?
Yea... who needs a satellite dish when neither of the locations are a satellite.
The station now carries nothing but cooking shows.
Ok so yes the first part talks about the cost of him using this to rig wifi... but the second part says they applied the same technique to the TV station a year later.
so to recap
the title of TFA refers to the last couple paragraphs
the 80$ vs 20$ solution refers to his first attempt doing wifi a year before this.
there is no mention of how much the TV station actually spent aside from the inferred price of 20$ per wok.
jezz talk about signal to noise...
- what's wrong with our subspace communication, geordi? :))
- Sir, the wok seems to be jammed
ever seen the space balls movie?
funny pics
The work is pressed steel so it is easy to solder/weld to. The feed cable was kept to less than 1 metre in most versions and is rg219 coax. A 4inch or so, tight fitting piece of thinwall brass tube was placed over the coax and soldered to the wok. The wok feed is a "circular biquad" which is documented elsewhere on the web. The distance from the back of the wok to the feed was determined by measuring the signal recieved at the other end of the link. This shows when the transmit swr is better and is more important than messuring the dish's recieve signal. The wifi units are linksys wrt54g's running ddwrt firmware and the computers are running linux and vlc for video streaming.