bmoore314

You might want to try rotating the cantenna, so the probe comes out the 'side' instead of the 'bottom' this will change the polarization of the cantenna, and even though you will have wrong polarization combo, it seems that having the probe parallel to the ground, it reduces reflections and noise, which gives you a cleaner signal. Another idea is (if possible) put a conical cantenna on both ends, the reduced xmit will be picked up by the high gain of the antennas on both ends. True story, one guy made a conical antenna out of a hot water heater, and put it in his attic to recieve hbo, when it was broadcast at 2.3 ghz. The gain was huge, around 40-50 db, but it was recieve only, didnt have to transmit.

Another idea I have tried is to make a slot for the probe in the cantenna, instead of a hole, and adjust the probe forward and back slightly in order to find the spot with the highest gain. Your drilling could be off by a slight bit, and at these frequencies, a small ammount makes a large difference. Also make sure to buy high quality connectors, and high quality cable. The N connectors on my cable are expensive, silver, with a gold plated center conductor. Each connector runs about 8 bucks or so. They have low loss compared to most of the cheap N connectors. My cable is some rg8u (i think) which isnt the best, but it works. When I make my cable longer, I am going to use some lmr400 (i think, its the one that is about 3/8" diameter) which is expensive, but works the best. Compared to having my antenna hooked directly to the pigtail, and having the 10' section on it, I get about 6-7 db less SNR. (2 male n connectors, one female-female n connector, and the male n connector on the pigtail)

One interesting method of getting a signal, is an indirect signal, if you have a rather solid object directly between the two points, that is blocking it, aim both antennas at the peak of the solid object, and you might get a signal. The object difracts the sigal a bit, and makes kind of a shadow where the signal is weaker, but present. You can also try and get reflections of objects, for example, you may not have a direct line of sight to each other, but you both might have a direct line of site to someone's garage, or other large, flat area (side of a large building maybe) the signal could reflect off that building and possibly give you a decent connection as well.

With my cantenna's, I could get a signal by pointing in three different directions, one directly at the source, another about 45 degrees left of it, (pointing at the edge of a tree that is in the way) and for some reason if I pointed it about 15 degrees to the right of it, and about 20 degres above the horizon, I could get it as well.

Brian