Miscellaneous Projects

The Cable Antenna

The antenna that has been shipped with the BS11 is a so called sector-antenna. That means it is designed not to cover only a part of the area around the BTS. And it has a gain. The gain comes from the signal that is bundeled and sent into the sector. The advantage: You can use several BTSs to cover a cell (Each cell sector has its own BTS > More calls) and you can cover more distance with less power.

What is good if you want to run a mobile network is bad for experimental proposes. For us an antenna that covers the area around the BTS with a nondirected signal (like a donut) is perfect - so lets build one.

Note: I have Adaptors that adapt the BS11 N-Connectors to BNC. Because BNC is my favourite connector type so the most of my homebrew radio equipment / cables have BNC-Connectors. That is the reason why this howto relates to BNC-Connectors. Just use your favorite connector type or N-Connectors for the BS11

Step by step ==
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The antenna is made out of a pice of old coax-cable (about 15-20cm length) and a BNC connector. To make it all looking good we add a pice of shrink tubing at the end.

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The first task to do is to connect the connector to the cable. I used a solderable BNC-Connector. If you have an old network cable you can cut off the and. The result is the same.

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Now cut of the isolation and remove the metall shield.