After you're done munching on the chips, turn that can into hardware you can use.

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No matter what type of antenna you build, you'll need to attach it to your Wi-Fi card or base station. This is where things can get difficult. It all depends on what kind of card or base station you have.

Most Wi-Fi CardBus/PC cards don't have an antenna jack. In some cases you can create your own or solder an antenna lead onto the card. This is not for the faint of heart. It involves cracking open the card and soldering a cable lead or a jack onto it, and possibly some tiny surface mount parts, too.



Most Orinoco, Lucent, and Agere cards have just such a jack for an antenna. Does that make it a 100 percent brain-free process to bolt your antenna onto it? Nope. You'll need to buy or build a "pigtail." A pigtail turns the tiny (and very uncommon) jack on the back of that 802.11b card into a larger jack for your antenna. SeattleWireless has a great page of pigtail pictures and where to find them.

Do yourself a favor. If you want to play with 802.11b antennas, buy an Orinoco, Lucent, or Agere card and order a pigtail online. Our local purveyor of all things electronic, Electronics Plus (which stores something like a half million parts), didn't have any of the connectors used on these cards and didn't know where to order 'em.

While you've got that credit card out, order some LMR400 cable to go between your antenna and your Wi-Fi card. Ripping some old cable TV coax out of your hose won't work. Ten feet of common coax will absorb the 30-milliwatt, 2.4-GHz signal from your card before it gets to the antenna. Gaining signal and picking up your base station from halfway across town is the whole point of this, right?

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