A Cheap Simple High Performance 802.11 Antenna
There is a lot of good information available on the internet for homebuilt 2.4 GHz WLAN antennas for 802.11. Here is one that will outperform most of those antennas and most commercial ones as well. It’s called a Curtain Quad. It is cheap and simple and has a gain of about 17 dBi. The following describes a version of this antenna that I built and tested.
There is a lot of good information available on the internet for homebuilt 2.4 GHz WLAN antennas for 802.11. Here is one that will outperform most of those antennas and most commercial ones as well. It’s called a Curtain Quad. It is cheap and simple and has a gain of about 17 dBi. The following describes a version of this antenna that I built and tested.
The material list is as follows:
- 3 inch by 2 inch welded wire fence (bought locally from Orchard Supply Hardware). The wire radius is about 0.031 inch, which is what #16 steel wire is when galvanized.
- Foam insulation 1 inch thick (from Home Depot or Lowes).
- Heavy duty aluminum foil.
- Short piece of two conductor speaker wire.
- Scrap piece of aluminum sheet 3 or 4 inches in diameter
- Flush mount female type N connector
