

Then the extra wire was trimmed off and the outside wire was soldered to the ground plane to complete the antenna. The element was supported by two pieces of scrap copper trimmed to 15mm to ensure proper positioning. The next step was to solder our bow tie shaped element to the vertical wires. We let the epoxy cure for a while before proceeding.

The thin copper sheet was attached to the front with epoxy and trimmed to fit. We recommend you solder the outside piece of wire first before doing the center one.Īfter the connector had cooled it was attached to the black plastic base using epoxy. This worked pretty well except it desoldered our center pin. We bought a butane torch and used that to heat up the surfaces. Our cheapy iron was not capable of getting the connector's base hot enough to make a good solder joint. Next we soldered a piece of of wire to the outside of the connector. We then soldered a piece of copper wire to the center pin of our N-connector. We drilled a hole in the center to clear our connector. Next we cut out a 110mm square of black plastic to use as a base for the reflector. With the pliers held perpendicular to each other bend the wire against one of the sets of jaws. The easiest way to make really sharp bends in the solid copper wire is to use two pairs of pliers. We tried to make the length of each leg 30.5mm. We marked the wire every 31mm with a permanent marker and began bending the wire into a double diamond shape. The first step in building the element was stripping and cutting a 244mm length of wire. We didn't have any copper printed circuit board material laying around so we used this thin sheet of copper and supported it using the 1/4-inch thick black plastic pictured. The wire is standard solid-core 3-conductor wire used for most house wiring. Here are the raw materials we started with: We followed the slightly more thorough instructions found at. Trevor Marshall built one of the first biquad WiFi antennas found on the internet. We'll cover the reason for the mini butane torch later. We got our surplus DirecTV dish from Freecycle. We also purchased 10 feet of WBC 400 coax cable so we wouldn't have to sit with the dish in our lap.
#Diy double biquad wifi antenna plus#
The short pigtail is a RP-MMCX to N-Male pigtail so we can connect to our Senao 2511CD PLUS EXT2 WiFi card which is pictured. The "N-connector" is standard across the majority of commercial antennas and you can connect them to your wireless devices using "pigtails." The longer pigtail in the picture is a RP-TNC to N-Male pigtail that we'll use to connect our antenna to a Linksys WRT54G access point. The most important part here is the small silver panel mount N-connector in the center of the picture the entire antenna will be built on this. We did have to buy some specialized parts before getting started though. Using consumer WiFi gear we picked up over 18 APs in an area with only 1 house per square mile.īiquad antennas can be built from common materials, which is nice because you don't have to scrounge around for the perfectly-sized soup can. Why? With just a handful of cheap parts, a salvaged DirecTV dish and a little soldering, we were able to detect access points from over 8 miles away. Follow along as we assemble the feed, attach it to a DirecTV dish and test out its performance. We're building a biquad antenna feed because it offers very good performance and is pretty forgiving when it comes to assembly errors. The dish helps focus the radio waves onto a directional antenna feed. A dish that big is usually overkill for most people and modern mini-dishes work just as well. This summer the longest link ever was established over 125 miles using old 12 foot and 10 foot satellite dishes. Use mine calculated data and measurements for AWS 1700/2100 MHz antenna.Wireless enthusiasts have been repurposing satellite dishes for a couple years now. (Note: all calculations in links are for 2.4 GH z WiFi antenna. There are plenty of tutorials for these steps:, or
#Diy double biquad wifi antenna how to#
I will not show you picture after the picture how to drill the hole in center of reflector. Spacers must beįrom any non-metallic material.
