Author: Tommy

About bloody time! Right? It really didn't take long once I sat down to do it. Maybe 15minutes? I was able to use FeedCreator, as suggested by a friend of mine. It made the whole process pretty trivial. You asked for it, now you got it. So, there you have it. Quick, easy, done.

Don't know what RSS is? It's a quick way to check various websites without having to go visit each one individually. It makes surfing the web and staying on top of news and blog entries a cinch. Simply "subscribe" to an RSS feed (like neodux) by using a Reader, like Google Start Page, Google Reader or My Yahoo.

Oh yeah, the link is http://www.neodux.com/rss. What do ya think?

In my ongoing stream of new posts, I wanted to make today's post on my super-cool array of birthday gifts that I have received over the past week.

The first gift I received was the ever-present birthday money from the grandparents (always a plus!), my mom came up for Easter and my birthday (which coincided this year) and to see some of the snow we had fall on us on Saturday. I got a stash of new clothes, a nice dinner and a zOMG huge map of 1836 Texas that outlines the Texan fight for independence. Pretty cool.

I thought the map was it, but Jennifer had another treat for me. She bought me a nice 8-gallon 115psi air compressor from Harbor Freight that I was eyeballing since it went on sale for that week. I can now drive the impact wrench, grinding tools and other air tools I've received from my father-in-law or bought since Christmas. (I think I may have also found another toy to use with my air compressor.)

As if all that weren't enough, I spent some of my birthday money ordering a few items I had also been eyeballing. Of course you read about my Arrow Antenna, I also received my 300mW ZComax wireless card which is pretty much, flat out awesome. I've made pretty decent connections for quite a distance with my cantenna mounted on my new tripod.

update: Whoa, how could I forget?! Notorious got me this great shirt and a sticker of "when i hit the drum you shake the booty". Right On...

This past Thursday afternoon I received my new Arrow Antenna. It's a dual-band (2m/70cm) handheld yagi antenna made from aluminum arrow shafts for making contacts with amateur radio satellites. What? You didn't know there were ham radio satellites? Yep, and there's more than one.

Using Heavens-Above, I can find when each satellite will be making a pass over my location as well as the angle and direction of the approach and apex. About an hour after I got the antenna, AO-27 was making one of its daily passes over me. I made sure everything was in order, set my radio to the right frequencies and walked to the field across from my house. Right off the bat I heard guys in New England talking with guys in Florida. Most everyone on the air was using a handheld with relatively low power (under 5W, which normally isn't enough to even get you across town). After just a few minutes I heard my chance to throw out my call. Right away I had two stations come back to me. First time to ever hear the satellite and I was making a contact on one. Unfortunately I didn't have a free hand to write down his callsign and I forgot it! Oops!

How does it work? Essentially the little satellite takes my signal and rebroadcasts it like a ground-based repeater does, only it's up - way up. Because it's up so high, it can rebroadcast my signal to most of North America. To hear me all the other station has to do is listen on the "downlink" frequency.
Really it doesn't take any special antenna to allow this, it's just this antenna is very efficient and easy to aim at just the right spot. Sometime in the future I'd like to try to make an altazimuth mount to automatically steer the antenna for me, but that's way down the road. For now I'm just looking forward to the next satellite pass!

A while back, in the Forums, I made a post about getting a free Fonera router from Fon. There's been considerable buzz about these little routers and how quite a few people have been able to hack them.

Normally, the Fonera will be hooked up to provide a private wireless network for the owner and an open, albeit throttled, free wireless connection for those on the Fon wireless network. (The idea is to blanket the world with wireless - good idea, in theory. More about Fon on wikipedia.)

Early on Fon was dishing out modified Linksys WRT54G routers, but it was overkill for their intended purpose. Then came the Fonera, which is a tiny little one-port, one antenna router. Its like a travel size router and the antenna is about half the height of my WRT54G. The router's software tells it to "phone home" once it's found an internet connection to update any software. It also registers itself as part of the active Fon network. After grabbing the newest flash it becomes a bit more tricky to mod. ...I made sure not to plug mine in.

I found quite a few HOW-TOs, but some seemed to be dated or aimed at older firmwares. I received a rev 4 model. The mods include adding another antenna to doubling the internal ram from 16Mb to 32Mb (too much work). Both were a bit more than I cared to bother with. Instead I chose to install DD-WRT on the little box to match my other WRT54G.

The first step was to enable SSH access. This was done by way of this HOWTO.
Next, I needed to grab the DD-WRT files compressed for the Fonera's slim 16Mb, as well as a forged bootloader signature. I found all of this info at this other great tutorial. I followed the instructions word for word and it worked flawlessly. (No he didn't make any typos.)

I spent a while lurking alot of HOWTOs, but these two seemed to capture all of what I needed. It didn't take me long to enable SSH. Maybe about 20minutes from setting up a switch apart from my existing network, to logging into the shell and enabling the SSH daemon permanently. Flashing with DD-WRT took a little longer, but a bit of that is spent waiting as the little processor loads the new filesystem into memory. A great project to embark on if you have a Fonera and don't know what to do with it.

Finally. Yes, I finally got around to making a cantenna. Years ago I read about the now famous Pringles Cantenna which I've always thought was a cool concept and has been something I've wanted to do. Now it's a bit of use to me since I enjoy using my laptop on the move using NetStumbler to locate open access points.

I began with a bit of reading and looking up what all is needed to construct a Pringles cantenna, and before long I learned that the Pringles isn't really the best way to go. Nope, instead I found that the Pringles design was out performed by a Cantenna made from a can of beef stew! Not only does it perform better, it's way easier to make. In fact, after buying the ready-made 1.21" radiating element from jefatech.com, this construction was probably the easiest project I've attempted. I found out that a large can of Dinty Moore is the same size as the "Nally's Beef Stew", so guess what I had for dinner one night? I cleaned out the can, and went to the machine lab the next day to use a drill press to pop a 5/8" hole for the N-connector. Took it home and tried it out. Wow! I went from seeing 1 AP (mine) to 20, just in my front yard. Not bad for just a can with a connector on it. I then took a stroll to see what the neighborhood has to offer and found an open Netgear access point. After zeroing in on the source, I found that it was about 120yds from my original location and across a street! (...and that was being able to use it, I was able to detect at a further distance.)

Fine and dandy, but the can just wasn't good enough on its own. I had to do more. I added a 6"-to-4" heat pipe coupler to the front end to funnel in more signal, which I had seen on a cantenna made from a Pirouette can. (Yeah, I made one of those too. Just today, in fact.) The funnel gave me a noticeable difference in signal strength when I'm at a distance. I think I remember seeing it jump about 3dB in signal strength after I slipped it on. (That's a doubling of power!)

In case you missed the links:

Here's the original can.

Here it is with the funnel (kinda looks like a flashlight)

Inside the cantenna (radiating element is about 1.21" long)

The new Pirouette model (yet to be field tested)

Grendel sez: For those wanting to make one too, I just learned that the large 40oz can of Walmart brand ravioli comes in a similar can and it's a couple bucks cheaper. (guess it depends on how much you like beef stew vs. ravioli.)
FYI - Can dimensions: 3.9" diameter, 6" long