Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Skinning the Cat





Or did it skin me? I got tired of not being able to use the laptop at night to cut down on battery drain so decided to skin the cat and go back to the old technology I used back at the BBMI. In this case I used another satellite dish aimed at the legion with the laptop in front of it. That allowed me to be able to get online with the internal WiFi card rather than the WiFi key in the dish outside. This left a LOT to be desired, but it was better than nothing. Shortly after I set this up it dawned on me that there could be an IP conflict between the WiFi card and the WiFi key so I disabled the internal card and what do you know? That was the problem. Now I'm back online with the dish and WiFi key again so could get that damn dish out of here.

11 comments:

  1. Wow I never really heard of using a satellite dish like that, sound neat do you have more details? Does it just basically amplify the wifi signal?

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  2. Necessity is the mother of invention.

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  3. frankhdesign, Its more like focusing than amplifing. It catches all of the signals going away from the WiFi device and bounces them back toward the transmitter and does the same for the signal coming back, but focuses it more heavily on the WiFi in the computer. That allows connection when otherwise the signal would be too weak. At the BBMI I took a cardboard box and opened up the flaps to about a 30 degree angle and then covered it with foil. It allowed me to stay connected there even when other RVs parked between the RV I was in and the tower.

    I didn't invent this I was doing some web searching while I was there and found where some Sweeds took one of the old 8 foot satellite dishes and mounted it on a hill. They could stand in front of it at the right place and make cell phone calls through a tower 125 miles away. I figured if it would work for that it should work for WiFi and it does. The bigger the dish the further you can be away from the tower or server.

    DD, some times you got to do what you got to do, but I'm glad I don't have to do that every night now!

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  4. I am impressed...of course I don't have a clue what your talking about! But your a guru in my book.

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  5. Cool sounds neat and I guess the bigger the dish the better the effect. Gonna have to scrounge one some day

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  6. Not a guru Frann, just determined. ;)

    Frank, all depends on how far you want to reach with it as to how big it needs to be.

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  7. I'm impressed also. So,how far are you from the legion?

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  8. Lou, I'm just a quarter mile from the legion, but my first inside connection was 3 miles away and I was using a 12 inch plastic mixing bowl with foil over it at the time. There are pictures of that some time back in this blog. Before that I was using a home made dish made out of styrofoam covered with foil and I sat outside in front of the laptop to get online. That was with the WiFi sourse 3 miles away and meant doing my work outside the dungeon. Not much fun when it was windy and or cold! Matter of fact I didn't do that much because the foam dish kept trying to blow away.

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  9. Clever, David! Glad you're able to use the laptop again :)

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  10. I don't undertand most of what you said, but, I'm glad you're back on-line. It's tough to be without internet connection.

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