WiFi telescope

Posted Jun 10th 2008 4:30PM by Eliot Phillips
Filed under: wireless hacks

We Make Money Not Art recently visited the LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijón, Spain. The installation that left the strongest impression on [Regine] was the WiFi sightseeing telescope built by Clara Boj and Diego Diaz. Spain is in a situation similar to the USA: A few years ago many municipal WiFi projects launched only to be squashed because of theoretical unfair competition with local utilities. Now commercial projects like WeFi, Whisher, and FON encourage people to "share" their WiFi. Observatorio (Observatory) is designed to provide insight into the current state of local WiFi. It uses a highly directional Yagi antenna to collect wireless access data from the local area. The antenna has a 30deg aperture which is matched to a camera with an identical field of view. The observer sees the camera's viewpoint with the WiFi data overlaid showing where accesspoints are and whether the AP is open. WMMNA also recommends you check out the WiFi Camera which photographs electromagnetic space.

Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. That is not a Yagi antenna.

Posted at 5:46PM on Jun 10th 2008 by Geoff

2. It is actually, incedentally I have one just like it. The classic Yagi-Uda antenna is contained inside, aligned for polarity like this:

http://www.wikarekare.org/Antenna/YagiOpenEnded.gif

I must admit, in almost every application I prefer the higher gain of my parabolic dish though :)

-otis

Posted at 6:01PM on Jun 10th 2008 by otis

3. Cool idea, but 30° isn't really much of a "telescope".

Posted at 6:36PM on Jun 10th 2008 by David

4. My bad, I couldn't find anything that indicated the type of antenna other than the pics and the link to the wifi camera. The wifi camera uses a cantenna or waveguide antenna - so I assumed the wifi telescope used the same. Assumption is the mother of all...

Posted at 9:33PM on Jun 10th 2008 by Geoff

5. This site shows us nothing DIY for us to make or modify or hack on our own. This is not a hack!
*confused*

Posted at 4:59AM on Jun 12th 2008 by Louis

6. Build a high gain directional WiFi antenna for around $15

http://tonynazzal.blogspot.com/2008/06/build-high-gain-directional-wifi.html

Posted at 1:51PM on Jun 24th 2008 by Tony Nazzal

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry: inappropriate or purely promotional comments may be removed. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br> tags.