homemade wireless antenna

[gareva1]

I apologize if this is somewhere staring me in the face and I'm too blind/stupid to see it, but...

I found a reference to a wireless antenna built and used for a defcon competition that had a range of 35mi, built for under $100 solely from home depot parts at tom's hardware. Is there a link to the wireless antenna competition part of defcon that would show pictures of this antenna, and are there drawings/plans out there on how to build it?

If this is not the appropriate place to post this, please kindly point me in the right direction and I will search further there.

[EeeekPenguins]

35mi huh? for under $100? I doubt it. Are you sure it wasnt 35dbi? It's not possible to build an antenna that would have the kinda gain to reach 35mi just for $100 at least as far as I know.

[gareva1]

could very well be a typo on the site:

http://www4.tomshardware.com/column/20040430/war_flying-02.html


quoted from the article on said site about "warflying":

Another reason for war driving/ war flying is to test wireless hardware such as wireless cards and antennas. Hackers try to outdo each other by using the most powerful wireless cards or the best antennas. Each summer at the Defcon convention in Las Vegas, two interesting contests are held. The first is a war driving contest, where hackers try to find the most WAPS in the least amount of time. In the second contest, the Wi-Fi shootout, hackers see how far they can throw a wireless signal, using stock or home-made antennas. One time, the winner was able to send a wireless signal more than 35 miles! The antenna was built for $98, with parts purchased exclusively from Home Depot.


seemed a bit outrageous to me too, precisely the reason why I decided to post.

[EeeekPenguins]

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64440,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

Well the new record is 55.1mi so 32mi is not that bad but I would think to reach those kind of distances you would need a parabolic dish antenna and a large one at that.

[BlackOrchid]

http://www.wifi-shootout.com/ don't know if it gives any links to schematics however.

[kree]

Anything is possile in the world of wifi, this (http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/CookieCantenna) is a nice easy design to make as I made it at dc12 and had nice results with it, and there are other designs that I would like to make and learn from such as Flickengers (http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448), Lincomatic (http://www.geocities.com/lincomatic/homebrewant.html), and the Primestar (http://www.wwc.edu/~frohro/Airport/Primestar/Primestar.html). Another one that I have found that seems pretty fun and cheap is the Poor Man's WiFi (http://www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/). Just look around on google there is plenty of info out there on them.