Westside guy said:
Sorry if I wasn't clear enough. I very much appreciate the replies. As I said, I'm looking for an antenna that can be added to my Airport Extreme base station. My objective is simply to have a stronger signal available when I'm out in my yard.
I don't expect to cover the full property, but adding 20-25 feet to the current functional radius of our wireless network would be great. I understand that ideally you'd have an additional antenna on the laptop too, but that won't be the case. Of course we don't really know that laptop signal broadcast strength is a (or the) limiting factor in this particular equation anyway - though I'll find that out once I've installed an antenna on the base station!
I'm really hoping that more people like igucl who have actually used either of these particular products (or similar alternatives) will also chime in. If every Dr. Bott owner says "yeah, it's great" while the Hawking Tech owners have a mixed or poor response, that says quite a bit.
If you are curious about the product info:
Dr. Bott's antenna note that it's listed as +3.5dB (so I'm guessing that's indicating a total of 5.5dB since the Airport Extreme has a 2dB antenna).
Hawking Technologies antenna. You'll see that the gain on the HT antenna is quoted as 6dB.
Sorry I should have added that for each 3 db gain the signal doubles, so a 3db antenna is twice as good as a 0db antenna, an isotropic omni directional anttena is 3 db but its a mathamatical construct a real world one is "0"
Marketing people list them this way to fool you
dbi is decibells isotropic, db is real world.
Sorry you cant add db from one antenna to another the way you did, its one or the other normally, so plugging another one in to the base station does not add to whats there all ready.
2 db for the airport is probably being a bit creative with the numbers some were
what you will find is that the airport antenna is a bit directional, if you look at it sat on a table the signal is around the airport and above it but is blocked from going under it, if the signal that would be under the table is added to whats above the table then it would give you the 2db gain quoted.
This is important becouse if you have the airport mounted on a wall facing away from your garden then that garden area has a 2 db loss compared to whats in front of the airport in the house! I got called out to an installation were this happened, the car park had all the signal the building had none
If the airport is sat on a table or surface upstairs in your house then the signal is shealded from your garden as well! so you want to mount it on an inside wall facing the dirction of the garden, also mount it in front of a window if yo can as walls cut the signal down depending on what they are made off, flint knapp walls cu the signal down terribly
Imagine a soccer ball cut in half and placed over the airport, thats the shape of the signal coming off the base station, for an omni directional antenna imagine a doughnut placed over the antenna, for a directional antenna think of a cone, the higher the db the more pointy the cone is.
The 6 db antenna is the better choise as you can turn down the transmit power of the base station to adjust the range but remember you want the 6 db gain for the reeived signal as well.
Before you buy sit in the garden with the laptop and get some one to move the basestation around a bit and see if you cant find a way to get it to do what you want, some times moving it just a foot or changine its mounting direction will make it work!
Viv
