The Final Product
The screen shots below are the first connection and file transfer I
made, but not the fastest. I can get much better rates than those
shown
(highlighted
in light red) with a faster PC, but the
screen shots below capture the first moments of sweet success. In
a later
test, a 1.4 GHz Athlon PC talking to a 2.4 GHz
Pentium got 800 KB/s in Half Duplex mode. This is three times
faster than my 10 Mbit wired connection spanning the same
distance.
Recently, a lightning strike nailed, yet again, the
10Base2 LAN. The WLAN was untouched. To date
none of the WRT54GS' have failed, with a combined uptime of about 4
months.
File shares on 2 PCs linked by WDS across c. 250m (with 125m
forest). The ARP table highlighted in red shows 192.168.4.66 and
192.168.4.130- these two machines are on the same net, bridged across
two access points.
In conclusion, BiQuad antennas are easy to build and quite
robust. They are more reliable and faster than 10Base2 thinnet in
my rural long span application. While most folks will simply buy
a commercial antenna, one can build a competitive product for a
fraction of the cost in a few hours. I have had a lot of fun
working on this project. I hope this HOWTO and the templates
prove useful to all of you who want to try your hand at microwave
wireless LANs or GSM band cell phone antennas.