3 ms·
People have managed to achieve much greater ranges (like more than a kilometre) with 802.11 technology using "cantennas" -- directional antennas like what you'r
by mryall 15y ago
People have managed to achieve much greater ranges (like more than a kilometre) with 802.11 technology using "cantennas" -- directional antennas like what you're talking about.
While it's theoretically possible, I'm not sure whether this is practical for general use on a LAN. You'd probably have to have a wireless antenna poking out of your laptop, which you'd point at the access point. Seems a little bit inconvenient.
- mturmon 15y agoPointing a big antenna is not how it would work. You don't need to point the antenna at anything; you can use multiple antennas that steer the beam ("beamforming") in a desired direction. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_antenna http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_antenna Basically you can have a "phased array" of N antennas (2 counts as an array, but you can think of a line of say N=8 antennas) that delay their broadcasts relative to each other in such a way that the N signals interfere constructively along some directions and destructively along other directions. This is because, from far away, cos(angle_from_line_of_antenna_array) = const*propagation_delay_between_antennas
- mryall 15y agoAh, clever! Thanks for the link.