[MLB-WIRELESS] Waterproof casing advice...

[Donovan Baarda]

On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 21:52, Ratbaggy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> A $15.00 box is cheaper than a wet Minitar that's eaten itself.
[...]

OK, I've been convinced, a Jaycar ABS box it is.

> Teamed up with the Jaycar glands for cat-5 and antenna cables on the bottom
> side we have had no ingress of moisture at all.  If you wanted to use the
> smallest box (cheaper) that fits the minitar, you could poke the antenna out
> through a gland.

Good idea... I didn't think of that. How would the little minitar omni
hold up against the weather?  Should I put it in heatshrink? Is it OK
for the aerial to point down, reducing the chance of water getting in,
or does it need to point up?

> If you extend the aluminium plate past the box so as it sits behind the
> antenna it will act as a reflector and give you a bit of directionality and
> an extra 3 dB of antenna gain.  Ideally the antenna should be about 3-4 cm
> away from a plane reflector.

Another good hint... should this stuff go up on the wiki? I can write up
this stuff after I do it if people think it's worthwhile.

> BTW it is easy to mod a Minitar for POE, just cut the two tracks that run to
> the terminating resistors for the unused cat-5 pairs.  Then run a wire at
> the back of the Ethernet connector from each of the unused pairs to the
> power inlet connector.  Make sure you get the polarity right!

I think I'd rather modify a cable than modify the minitar :-)

If someone plugs a modified minitar straight into a 10/100 switch and
the power plug-pack, they will feed 12V into the switch... not good :-(

-- 
Donovan Baarda <abo at minkirri.apana.org.au>
http://minkirri.apana.org.au/~abo/


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