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. 

a


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.
a



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.


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