Interesting Quick Thought

[Tony Langdon]

Hi Everyone,
I had a brief thought today.  Everyone's main concern with wireless
networking is cost, It's great new technology and is actually reasonably
cheap to setup in comparison to other typical communication networks.
Anyway, my thought was is it possible to use existing TV antenna's on
peoples roofs for wireless networking, would it be possible with some
tweaking to enable the antenna to be used to both TV and WLAN?  They run at
2 completely different frequencies but considering most TV antenna's pick up
both UHF and VHF then I'm assuming it might not be a problem.  The other
thing would be WLAN needs literally no interferace between the antenna and
the WLAN card and good line of sight.  There are also other issues to
consider such as If the TV and the WLAN is being used at the same time,
would it be possible to creat some dual connector similar to an RF switch or
something?
There are several things to think about and consider, most people would look
at it and think it's not possible and that it's a waste of time, but surely
if we could eliminate the cost of the user installing an all new antenna
then the possibilities when it comes to expanding our wireless networks
would be limitless!

--------------------

There is one hitch with this idea.  TV antennas are designed to work in the
ranges 45-230 MHz (VHF) and 500-860 MHz (UHF).  Wireless networking is in
the 2400-2463 MHz band, which is well outside the frequency range of a TV
antenna.  This means that:

1.  The TV antenna will be inefficient at WLAN frequencies
2.  The TV antenna will have a poor radiation pattern (probably resemble
that of the average bit of wet string :) ).

Also, the feedline used for TV will be rather lossy at 2.4 GHz.

P.S.  Sorry for the awful looking quoting, but Outlook is brain dead when
handling HTML messages (please use plain text - I've converted this back).

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