I'm inspired

Well, I saw everyone else's posts and thought about how much I appreciated them, and figured everyone would like to see what's going on in my world. I tend to have a lot more pictures of the people around me than I do of myself, so you get what I've got. Just for the record, this takes forever from here because the picture uploads time out a lot because it's about dial-up speed during peak times - very frustrating.

One of the guys in my shop got promoted last week, and these are some pics from that....


This Colonel was friends with the Soldier's family back in Puerto Rico, so he came by to promote him. I look a little "wide" in this pic, but that's cuz my 9mm is holstered on my belt, underneath my shirt on my right side (on the left as you're viewing the picture).


These are some of the guys in my shop. I still don't have a pic of everyone in my shop....I'll get one soon.


This is one of the shelters that comprises my shop. The other one is down the walkway on the right.

I connect to the internet via a wireless connection over here, and my trailer is aluminum on all sides, roof, and underneath, so it's well shielded from wireless signals and I had poor connectivity (2-3 bars max). I was thinking of ways to increase my signal, thus getting a better connection. I decided to build an external wifi antenna. It's an omnidirectional antenna with about 9 dB of gain (in theory; I didn't test it with a spectrum analyzer) and it's mounted on the outside of the trailer with a cable that's routed to my desk. It would cost $75-100 to buy one with that much gain, so I built one instead. I got some pics of it (mainly to capture the steps of the building process), and I figured I'd post them here. Each of the small sections that you see is measured to 1/2 half wavelength; the one with longer wire sticking out is a 1/2 wavelength section and a 1/4 wavelength section. When I was done, I encased it in some electrical PVC conduit and it actually looks like something you'd buy (I didn't get any pics of that yet). After doing this, one of the units asked me to build an antenna for their hand held radios because they would have to stand outside the HQ building just so they could communicate with the Soldiers in the trailers (less than 1/2 a mile away) because the building was killing the signal. I built one for the frequency they were using and now they can hear guys on another FOB that is over 5 miles away! (it had over 10 dB gain on the spectrum analyzer)




The antenna with all of the sections soldered together and ready for the lead cable & connector, then permanent placement in the conduit.


In the shop building my antenna.

In order to connect the new antenna to my laptop, I had to connect a pigtail to my computer. I had a blank panel on the side of the laptop, so I decided to permanently mount the pigtail connector there and route the cable to the internal wireless card. This required drilling a 1/4" hole in the blank panel. In order to do that, I had to completely disassemble the laptop. Here are a couple of pics from that.




I know I said I took the laptop completely apart, yet the motherboard is clearly still attached to the chassis in this picture but that's because it was taken before I removed the MB.

Since the big antenna is mounted on the roof and routed to my computer, and I used the least amount of cable possible (to minimize loss), I'm kind of stuck at my desk if I want to use the internet. As a workaround, I built a smaller antenna (less gain, but still 4-5 bars in the trailer) that I can attach to the permanently mounted pigtail so I have no wires again! (I still have the internal wireless antenna, and will probably revert to that when I get home, but it's disconnected right now.) Please forgive the poor quality; my camera is at my office, so I used my cell phone to take these.


It looks like the cable is going straight into the laptop; it's actually screwed on to the connector on the other end of the pigtail. I would have taken a picture of just the connector, but then I would have been disconnected from the internet.


This is my "small" antenna so I'm not stuck at the desk. It's built using the same theory, but with smaller cable and less sections. I don't like this one, so I'm gonna build a smaller, better one when I get some new connectors.

I'm building a chair for my room in my spare time; I'll post some pics of that on here when I get done.