tehlunix.org

My dad’s a camper. Well… sort of. He spends about a month per year camping in his RV. He’s got a laptop. It has a wireless internet connection. But he can rarely use it because his “wireless campgrounds” tend to have a single WAP at one end of the campground. In their office. With cheezy little antennas. And a picnic table outside so you can drag your laptop out to it and do your surfing there. It’s a little less than ideal. So I’ve set out to fix this for my dad. I’m going to make dad a beefy antenna for his RV. The antenna will have a USB wifi dongle inside it so there’s VERY low RF loss. A USB cable will then plug into his laptop. That’s the plan, anyway.

So I went out and got a couple of wifi dongles. Both have internal antennas. Both will require me to solder the feed from the big antenna onto these cards. But I can’t figure out exactly where. (Or I think I know but don’t want to screw it up).

So, without further adieu… The two cards:

CARD ONE- A generic card with an RTL8187L chipset. The single antenna on it is obvious. Looks like a pretty reasonable place to solder the antenna feed, too:

Card1 - Front

Card1 - Back

CARD TWO:

Card2 - Front

Card2 - Back

But here’s the kicker… if I pry up the small sheet from the front of the card, I see what looks like a prime spot to solder in another antenna. But should I? And what’s the sheet for, anyway?

Card2 - Front Exposed