[Ham-80211] Antenna and AP Selection Assistance

[Robert Mahoney]

All,

I'm sending my son off to school and his living area is just outside of the range of the university's wireless network.  My assumption is the individual who made the statement about being out of range by half a street's width was talking about a laptop setup that did not include an antenna with any significant gain.  My son's room is approximately 60 feet from the perimeter of one of the networked facilities.

Although my son is a ham, I don't want to encourage amateur use of the equipment until he gauges the time he needs to devote to his "real job."  So I'm trying to provide a setup he can use to get that little bit of extra signal strength to operate his desktop on the university's network from his room.  He will have a user account on the network.

The university network is 802.11 b/g using Cisco Aironet 350 and 1200 Series Access Points according to their documentation.  My local IT store has the following antennas available.

D-Link DWL-R60AT Microstrip 6dbi antenna Indoor

Hawking H-AI6SDP High Gain directional 6dbi antenna Indoor 

Hawking H-AI15SC Corner directional 15dbi antenna Indoor 

Hawking HA014SD High Gain Directional 14dbi Kit Outdoor

If anyone can recommend an antenna for his room and a box to connect between the antenna and his desktop I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,
de wb8cxn