Archive for the Projects Category

ON0VRT is a repeaterplatform installed at the VRT tower, located in Sint Pieters Leeuw, near Brussels.
The platform will house a 6m, 2m, 70cm and a 23cm repeater. To see the range, I thought that displaying the various reception reports on a map is usefull. So after a couple of days playing with Google Maps and some XML files the current beta site is alive.

To see it in action go to http://report.on4aob.be/
on0vrt-reception-reports

A cantenna is a directional waveguide antenna for long-range Wi-Fi used to increase the range of (or snoop on) a wireless network. Although the original design was based on a Pringles potato chip can, a cantenna can be made from various cans/bottles. These include antennas on both the ground and antennas heightened by means of a pole. While cantennas are useful for extending a wireless local area network (WLAN), the tiny design makes them ideal for mobile applications such as wardriving. The design of the cantenna is so simple that it is often the first antenna WiFi experimenters learn to build.
Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna

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I bought my Diamond X200n antenna on a local ham fleamarket in october 2006. It was brand new and never used before. The antenna was mounted on the first of august.
There is about 21m of H500 coax between the transceiver and the antenna. The antenna performs well on 70cm with a very low SWR curve. On 2m however the SWR is not what I expected.
On 146.000 MHz the SWR is 2,3:1 dropping to 1,8:1 on 144.000 MHz. That could be better. My neighbour and amateur ON5NV has the same antenna, so we replaced mine to see if the problem still occurs. It may be the connector or something with the coax.
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