It all started about three weeks ago. My “pretty much brother in law" did me proud when he decided to take a crack at building a cantenna rig for his laptop to increase his wifi from his neighbors house of which they were kind of enough to let him use. He ordered 30 feet of no-loss cable and the correct pigtail for his internal wifi card with an SMA connector on one end and a N connector on the other. He also made a nice looking pineapple can cantenna.

However, the reception still wasn’t all that great and you were still tethered to one corner of his “faraday cage like house of which no radio frequency could go in or out of”. So I came up with the idea of a repeater station and place the repeater and the can somewhere around his house where he could get reception. Now, I have setup cans before and got great results and I have setup repeaters before and also got great results however, I never combined the two and since he had a satellite dish laying around we decided to do an outdoor wifi satellite dish. Our fist attempt wound up in fail because we didn’t have an adapter for the router and tried to make our own…

And yeah… After we saw what it looked like… We scratched that idea… and decided to wait… Oh well…

So two weeks later we decided to go for round two after we got the parts and another linksys router. We went with a linksys WRT54GS and flashed it with DD-WRT and actually managed to find a version 2.0 so we had more ram and could stick the mega version of it on there and could run some better scripts such as AutoAP. Now I come from a computer and electronics background and Mike my brother-in-law comes from a kind of a mechanics background. So setting this thing up used both of our backgrounds and all and all was an awesome project. So the previous week we painted the old satelite dish black to give it that nice “covert” look.

Then we tried to find reception…

None There                        There Either

So none on the roof which would have been nice. So we decided to use a pole in the yard to see if that would work.

Success! Well we though it was turned out… No so much. After we relocated it in the garage the reception went missing like on the back of milk carton. So that then we decided to trouble shoot the can. We brought the router back outside and checked the reading and bam! Reception was back in action then we disconnect the can and… still connected with the same readings which meant the can wasn’t working right. So after some scavenging about… we found an old Guinness can that used to house some pajamas that Mike had got as a gift for Christmas. So it’s tooling time!

Bam new guiness can was in action and worked great!

However, the can wasn’t going to just stay floating there so Mike fashioned an awesome mount for it from a car project he was working on and it turned out to be the perfect angle!

The finished can in all of it’s glory.

Works great! Now when I go over to visit I wont have to wifi tether to my laptop anymore yayyy.

For a more technical write up see my write up of this project here.