Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
#1
![]() |
|||
|
|||
![]()
For some strange reason, wifi connectors are not compatible with normal
SMA coax connectors. The center pin is a male in an otherwise female connector. And visa versa. But you probably have accumulated a few wifi "rubber duck" antennas. Inside the plastic "duck" is just some thin teflon coax cable and a dipole antenna with a 1/4 wave shroud around the coax and 1/4 wave exposed center conductor. It's easy to separate the plastic duck off the antenna, just bend it at the joint just above the elbow and it should just pop off. Being teflon, you don't have to worry about melting it with the soldering iron. This coax looks to be 50 ohm impedance. Get a BNC connector and attach it like you would to coax of this thin type. To deal with the extra thin coax, I used a small solderable metal washer to give the shield clamping connector pieces (the funny looking washers) something to grab when you tighten the threaded on the outside bushing you tighten into the connector. As the connectors I had were meant for fatter coax. Don't forget to place the washers and such on the coax before you solder the washer to the coax shield. As a test, I inserted two such adapters into the feedline for my wifi antenna, and looked at the wifi utility software window that reports signal strength, and saw no desernable extra signal loss (less than a dB). (I scrapped out a bad wifi booster module to get its reverse SMA connectors to get the mate for the antenna side connector) Once you have built this adapter, you can then use regular good quality coax cable with BNC connectors (or N or other connector good for microwave work) to connect a homebrew wifi antenna to the wifi computer card. There's also a ham band that shares part of the wifi band, so we could conceivably run high gain high power ham to ham using wifi based equipment. |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|
![]() |
||||
Thread | Forum | |||
Good coax for WiFi (2.4 & 5 ghz)? | Antenna | |||
FS: Coax Connectors, Adapters & Bulk Coax Cable | Swap | |||
Homebrew "CanTenna" WiFi Antenna Shootout | Shortwave | |||
FS: Coax Connectors & Adapters | Swap | |||
FA: 4 new SMA coax adapters | Homebrew |