Mushroom Cantenna + Tripod

Last night, I was playing around with the cantenna I built yesterday from the plastic mushroom container and had in mind to use this tripod/music stand with the cantenna. The results were great. You will need to poke holds in the rear of your cantenna to run bread bag ties or zip ties through it so you can secure it to a tripod, pole, etc.



This is my final product. It worked very well and I'm about to start uploading screen shots of airmon-ng displaying various signal strengths when I turned my invention a certain way. I didn't really get any inspiration from online. I had the idea in my head because I remembered I had this music stand in storage, with no real use for it. I don't play music anymore, so I don't really need a music stand. What I like about it the most is that it's so lightweight and so portable.

It's also very adjustable. I could make it 12"-18" tall or extend it all the way up to 60" to put on a balcony. I switched the glossy white side of the wifi card to face the foil, then signals started to increase once I did that! You have to deal with a lot of trial and error before you find something that works for you. I'm going to play with a coffee cantenna later on, once I purchase a metal coffee can and use up all the coffee inside ;-)

Cantenna Ideas

I have 2 sets of disposable pans from the Dollar Store: a circular pie pan and a rectangular lasagna pan. Only costed me $1 each for 2 pans for cantenna testing. Once I get some things done around the house, and let my downstairs neighbors go to sleep, I'll get testing ASAP. I have a 15 foot USB cable that I can run out on my porch to test everything! I'll make it very similar to my "mushroom cantenna".

Mushroom Cantenna

This is a "mushroom cantenna", made with very simple household materials. The basic construction is a plastic or foam mushroom antenna, tin foil (dull side out), some bread bag ties, and some creativity. My wireless card, a TP-Link TL-WN321G ($9 from Amazon), works well in my cantenna. It has a loop on the top so I can pull the card "tight" in the cantenna so it doesn't flop around and is not solely relying on the USB cable to keep it upright.

I poked a hole in the plastic container, ran a breadbag tie through the top, and pulled it tight. I just lined the container with foil, with no hot glue or tape, and let the wireless card hold it straight.



This is a side view of my creation. As you can see at the very top, I poked a hole through the rear of the top of the container to run a bread bag tie, so it can hook onto the curtain hook in my window. Midway through the container, I poked two sets of holes so I can run ties through them and secure them to a pole or whatever I need to secure them to to get a signal boost. I have a tripod from a fold up music stand, which I'm going to convert into a wireless tripod to hold up my cantenna so the signal is not being blocked on my porch.

I can test the signal with various utilities and see if I'm getting the actual performance boost I want, or if the signal isn't working. I will post screen shots of my research on this blog for others to see what types of cantennas work, and what cantennas don't work.

Creativity is everything :-)