As some may recall, about a month ago, I asked about the feasibility of
running 802.11 down a hunk of cable TV coax. The responses showed me
that was a "major unlikely". To put it mildly.

I'm happy to say that despite that avenue not working out, functionality
has been achieved.

(Warning: Here comes "Don goes into advocate mode" verbiage. The rest of
this post may sound like an ad. It's just a happy customer.)

With a D-Link "ANT24-0700" antenna. Was going to build a cantenna, but I
was in Staples for paper, and when I walked through the wireless
section, I spotted this unit. Figured "What the heck - I'll hold on to
the receipt", and dragged it home. The package copy claims it to be a
"7dBi Omnidirectional High-Gain indoor antenna".

Yeah... OK... Package copy is nice, but I'm not interested in that
alone. I want results.

Unpack it. Nice and simple - cut the ears off the plastic and take it
out. It's in two pieces - a heavy (with nice little rubber "button"
feet) magnetic base unit that's more of a three-pointed star than a
triangle (and has provisions for, and comes with a "kit" for
wall-mounting) The second piece is a "rubber ducky on steroids" antenna
whip - Real close to a foot long, with an RP-SMA connector to thread
onto the base, and a hinge, just like the machine's original-equipment
ducky. A (package claim - I didn't bother to measure) 1.5 meter RG-178
cable connects it to an RP-SMA connector that screws directly onto my
card. (No need for the SMA-TNC adapter that came in the package with it
- use the adapter, and I've found that you can screw it onto a Linksys
router, though) Set up, it looks pretty much like an overgrown,
standalone version of the original equipment "rubber ducky" antenna.

And it sucks in the signal. In spades. Swapping from the card's original
duck to this thing took me from a display showing "no networks detected"
to a "signal strength is off the chart" connection to the target Linksys
wireless router before I had a chance to look back to the screen after
screwing it on.

The advice is to put it on the router, but... shrug According to "the
rules" I can't do anything with the router anyway, and it's working just
fine attached to the remote machine, so I'm happy enough with it. Betcha
if I hung one of these things on the router itself, the signal strength
would be as good as (maybe better than) having a wired connection.

Color me "tickled pink".

end "Don does endorsement" mode

--
Don Bruder - - If your "From:" address isn't on my whitelist,
or the subject of the message doesn't contain the exact text "PopperAndShadow"
somewhere, any message sent to this address will go in the garbage without my
ever knowing it arrived. Sorry... http://www.sonic.net/~dakidd for more info