BIG Muthaf*cking dish!

Ok, time to get serious....

Here's the latest addition to the family:



As you can see, it's bigger than a tall person.

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Here's Big Ben compared to the old model. Anyone know the formula for gain as a function of dish diameter?

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Trying to move it for tuning purposes was a bit of a mission:



No signal detected in Netstumbler :( We were trying for an AP < 3 kms away, but through heavy (tropical) vegetation.



We shall continue in our efforts, some focusing, better mounting, testing against a near source, etc etc.

D

Spirit Sucks

Ok, I have given up on the Spirit USB devices, as far as I am concerned they officially suck. It looks like _another_ one has bitten the dust, and a third one is also suspect. (It's detected but will not start)

This could all be a case of bad luck, combined with Windows XP running on a s l o w Pentium I laptop...but to be honest I can't be bothered finding out.

Personally, I think it was either hot-plugging or overheating that killed them.

I am still keen on the NZ version, which has a ZyDAS chipset, seems superior to the Atmel, or at least the spirit implementation of the Atmel chip.
The only complaint I have about the NZ device is that it has some weird kind of ceramic antenna, which apparently spews RF in all directions....At least the Spirit was a proper matched dipole with a reflector...and it also had a funky coax PCB pad that could have been used for patching to an external 1/4 wave stub or similar.

But you get that on the big jobs...time to move on.

Stuff in the works

-Waiting on Hills (25dBi?) antenna, will be testing USB device as a replacement feedhorn

-DSE NZ dongle is in the mail, should have it in the next day or so...will be doing comparison testing with AUS version of the device

-USB-over-CAT5/CAT6. Have obtained some scraps (10-20 metres) of a few different cable types. Nic is looking into some RS485 line-amp designs, we may end up designing a generic device that will allow us to plug USB "B" type connectors to one side, and then have an RJ45 connector as output...then maybe just terminate the other end of the CAT5 with an "A" type socket (for dongle connection)

For starters though we will just straight patch an "A-to-A" cable with some CAT5/6

Results will be posted when available

(Anyone have any good USB error-testing software? Need to be able to detect retries, dropped packets, throughput etc)