> just as a matter of idle curiosity, what's the highest-gain
> 802.11b antenna
> anyone has ever seen?
> any guesses as to the gain on the Arecibo radio telescope? ;)
>
> Carl Soderstrom.
> --
I understand your question, but point out that individual antennas can be
"stacked" so gains add. Quad high-gain arrays are commonly done by HAMs,
and are described in the ARRL books as I recall. Much higher could be
exponentially challenging, however.
I'm just guessing from very old memory, but I think the gain of a parabolic
dish like feed gain times the number of wavelengths of aperture diameter.
An old large-size satellite TV dish of 8 ft or so size fed by a dipole could
be around 48 dBi. Note however, that focus and beam width become issues: if
not focused for the "infinite conjugate" (parallel beam), the gain rules
don't apply in simple form, and directionality gets very narrow (very hard
to aim and keep aimed). Somebody makes a commercial dish of modest size
(2ft?) and maybe 24+dBi for WLAN: I'd stop there and never try to stack
those things... except as a passive repeater maybe.
---
Chuck Cole
Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to
grapple
with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
- From Douglas Adam's 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency'.