Antenna power?

HI All

Need some quick and dirty test equipment recommendations for determining
my antenna(s) power. Can solder ( actually, that is my favorite
programming language! ), can read schematics. Don't have cash for
spectrum or HP. <- I wish I would have picked up that *old* spectrum
last year when I thought that I wouldn't actually need it!

todh

: Need some quick and dirty test equipment recommendations for determining
: my antenna(s) power. Can solder ( actually, that is my favorite
: programming language! ), can read schematics. Don't have cash for
: spectrum or HP. <- I wish I would have picked up that *old* spectrum
: last year when I thought that I wouldn't actually need it!

Laptop + PCMCIA + NetStumbler?
Measure the signal level using antenna with known gain & netstumbler (2dBi
dipole) then change dipole to your antenna, subtract and voila ;-)

m.


--
Marcin Lukasik
Milea Wireless Communications, http://milea.pl
phone/fax/mobile: (++48) 13 4480070 / 13 4481148 / 509 390 490

,,the only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys''

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 07:04:52 -0800, OldGuy
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>Need some quick and dirty test equipment recommendations for determining
>my antenna(s) power.

Is this quick or dirty enough?
http://www.mrx.com.au/wireless/TestGear2_4ghz.htm
I'm not sure it's such a great idea as 1N21 and 1N23 WWII vintage
cartridge diodes are not exactly common.

>Can solder ( actually, that is my favorite
>programming language! ), can read schematics.

Once you learn which end of the soldering iron to grab, the rest is
easy.

>Don't have cash for
>spectrum or HP. <- I wish I would have picked up that *old* spectrum
>last year when I thought that I wouldn't actually need it!

HP141 series mainframes and plugins can be had fairly cheap. However,
the 10GHz plug in is not cheap if working. I've seen quite a few
"repairable" spectrum analyzers for sale, that offer a substantial
savings if you have some repair abilties, manuals, parts, and time.
You can sorta cheat (like me) by using the 1.2GHz plugin and using a
butchered, er... modified MMDS downconverter to look at 2.4GHz. One
catch. The inband response is anything but flat making calibration at
best a bad guess.

A really cheezy way of getting a 2.4GHz spectrum analyzer is to use a
frequency hopping card. These have 80 channels, each 1MHz wide, that
can be scanned. The popular card is the Proxim Rangelan2 7400 card.
The drivers from the Proxim site include replacment firmware and a DOS
based spectrum analyzer application. It's fairly crude but good
enough for crude relative level and spectra tests. A few catches.
The sensitivity sucks due to lack of spread spectrum processin gain,
and it doesn't work with XP.

http://www.e3.com.au/modules.php?op=...article&sid=22
http://www.proxim.com/support/all/ra...01-08-16e.html
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...tem=5724414084

You can also sorta play spectrum analyzer with a Prism 2 based card
and WLANExpert:
http://www.allaboutjake.com/network/...lanexpert.html


--
Jeff Liebermann (E-Mail Removed)
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 AE6KS 831-336-2558