On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 5:33 PM, Miguel Vargas <unroar@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have 3 satellite TV dishes I can donate. One is a round Dish Network dish
> that says "500" on it, another is a small round DirectTV dish, and the third
> is a bigger oval-ish DirectTV one that says "Slimline" on it.

Awesome! Do you need help bringing them to sudo room?

> I'd never heard of these types of dishes used for 2.4GHz wifi, but reading
> online it seems people are having success with them.

Yeah. They're just parabolic reflectors. They should reflect 2.4 ghz
just as well as everything else. The only parabolic antennas we need
to worry about are mesh antennas with much wider spacing than the
metal mesh in a normal microwave door. They should still work with
quite a bit wider spacing though.

> Here is a project were
> they used these types of dishes to detect wifi 8 miles away by replacing the
> feedhorn with a custom soldered "biquad" antenna,
> http://www.engadget.com/2005/11/15/how-to-build-a-wifi-biquad-dish-antenna/

Interesting. The easier solution is to use usb wifi dongle mounted in
place of the normal satellite receiver head. That also keeps signal
loss to a minimum as the connetion is digital (usb) all the way up to
the receiver.

--
Marc Juul