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Anyone else tried playing with DirecTV or Primestar dishes for long-shot directionals? We put together this one (see link below) and are working on fine tuning it for max performance. As of yet, there's only been minimal testing, since we got it built and it started to rain. Damned unpredictable Ohio weather...
Hopefully we'll have some more pix of the final product in use with distances of connection up soon.

http://insanenet.com/insanepics/index.cgi?mode=album&album=Misc_Sheeeeit/802.11b%20dish

L8R,
l0ckd0wn

Hi, yep this is very similar to our modified sky dish at

http://www.frars.org.uk/cgi-bin/render.pl?pageid=1160

regards,

mr_wlan

I really like the screen-style dish you've got vs. the solid plastic ones that are used here.
That point aside, what sort of range (Km.) are you able to get with a good clear LOS? We're coming up (what we think is) a little short on the distance.

Thanx,
l0ckd0wn

l0ckd0wn,
FWIW, I found this one over a year ago:

http://www.wwc.edu/~frohro/Airport/Primestar/Primestar.html

They report: "The range using two of these antennas with a line of sight path is around 10 miles at full bandwidth."

Thorn,
Thanx. Actually, that was the site that we had used for the design on ours. I think with that site and the mention of the 10mi range, aren't they using a dish-to-dish setup while testing?
However it's being done, it's very impressive. Mostly what I was looking for, though, was if someone had some personal experience with using a dish as a long-range directional antenna, for stumbling. We have a hilltop site with about a 2mi LOS shot to downtown. We're wondering what the feasability of picking anything up at a range like that would be with the dish, since it's mostly going to be coming from low-power omni-directional AP sources.

Thanx,
l0ckd0wn

l0ckd0wn,

Yes, that 10 miles is dish-to-dish.

Shipley reportedly has used a 24dBi Andrews dish (or similar) to pick up APs from a hilltop 12 miles outside of San Fransisco, so I would think that a homemade dish would work at least get 2 miles.

I've pick up APs at 7.65 miles LOS using a 19 dBi panel.

It sounds like you just need to keep tweaking the design and trying it out. Suggestion, if you can do this with the terrain, etc.: Set up a known AP which you can see, pick it up at a fairly close distance, and then move out, taking new readins at intervals. And don't forget: Aim lower with these things than looks right, the beam focus isn't where you might think.