Well, I finished the cantenna today… sort of. I say this because it appears to be working, but not very well. At first it didn’t work at all. It turns out I had made a fatal mistake when I mounted the “N” connector to the can. The signal part of the antenna was touching the actual side of the can. This caused a short. The actual antenna signal was shorted directly to ground. I had to take the mount off, wrap some tape around the antenna part, and then mount it back on.
The antenna seems to be working a little bit. I can point it off into the distance and Kismet will show the signal strength increase or decrease for the surrounding networks depending on where I point it. The signal change is usually only about 5-8db though. I was really hoping for a better signal. The trick here is that it’s difficult to tell where the problem is. It could be the way I soldered the coat hanger piece to the connector. It could be the way the connector is mounted to the can. It could also be the way I soldered the small coax cable to the actual network card. There are so many places this could be wrong. Really the only way to figure this out would be for me to get a wireless card with an external connector and hook up the cantenna to it. My guess is that I’m losing some signal in the solder connections I made on the wireless card itself. For now, though, I’m done with this project. I’ll fiddle with in on my wireless for some more testing but I don’t plan on trying to make it any better right now. There are just too many variables. Once I get some more money I’ll but a card with an external antenna connector and get back into this.