Cheapest USB Wireless Adaptor

I just need a really cheap one... like $10 shipped or less...
It needs to work decent, so no no name brands, or if it is, it needs to have good reviews

Thnak

 

$10...yur gonna get what u pay for...i swear by my Hawking HWUG1...have the stock antenna replaced with a 5dbi antenna...world of difference...

 

well, i ahd a $10 one, adn it worked great... but i lost it

 

if you do get one with a dongle it is better to use that.i read an article where they test usb with and w/out the dongle and an express card, and the usb with the dongle performed the best.

 

The cheapest is the one you don't buy

Here is the cheapest, I think is about $7;

http://www.airlinkplus.com/wireless/awll3025.htm

 

ehh...working great...here's a screenie of my NIC...i'm outside in the garage...i've got a homeade antenna from the house...built out of an old cell phone in a bag antenna...but it's still 20 or 30 feet away...

 

Why did you put the antenna inside a plastic tube?

 

it's outside...in the weather...didn't want it to get wet when it's raining...and yes it grounded with a (spark lightning arrestor) to a 6 foot steel rod buried in the ground...ground wire soldered directely to rod...not to much on those fasteners...they tend to rust...and with the rust goes your ground...

 

wow, do know of any good tutorials for making an external antenna like that.right now i use a small hawking dish antenna, but i can get a direct tv dish, i might take it and look a tutorial up.

 

Parabolic antenna feeders are frequency dependent, and you have to make sure of well matching all the antenna system components, feeder, transmission line, LNA/PA, etc.

 

i found a guide to make one, seems easy enough.

 

What guide is it?

 

i don't have a tut...i just happened to have an old cell phone in a bag...old...the size of a cordless house phone...had most everything i needed from it...an "N" connector...antenna...i just had to make a custom piece from some regular 10 gauge copper house wire to connect the N connector to accept an reverse RP-SMA connector...basically took a short piece of the solid #10 copper wire...hammered one end flat, drilled a small hole in it...i think 1/16"...the other end slowly rotated 90 degrees on an anvil and made it square...the hypotenuse of a square is longer than the diameter of the round wire...believe it or not...center punched that end and drilled a 1/16" hole into it...this was the homeade connection that put it all together...checked it step by step with an ohm meter to make sure i wasn't crossing ground with the antenna lead...of course you'll need pretty good soldering skills to be able to solder a connector like this together...the homeade piece...on the square end...i filled with flux...then high content lead solder...reheated it and to liquid solder again and placed the nail type end of the N connector into the solder filled hole...blast of canned air to cool it quickly to keep the solder from coming unset...i'm just a piddler...really like to invent things like this...the only thing else i needed was the cable to go from my WAP to the outside antenna...it was a donation from a friend...8 meter N to reverse RP-SMA...

 

it was a guide on engadget, if i do make this i can probably get a good connection from the downtown area, and if not then mcdonalds.

 

Can you post it?

 

here's the link

 

That's so nice, but I find they made it more painful than it was necessary. The satellite link uses the c-band (3.7 - 4.2GHz) and utilizes a waveguide to capture the signal, which the guide instruct to remove. They could have just used a different waveguide to capture signal in the WISP frequency band, which is much easier to do that the antenna they did. Then to convert the coax into the appropriate laptop antenna connector, actually it could also use the RF connector for the TV tuner, just bridged to the wireless card antenna input, so you don't lose the capability to go to a hot spot w/o such a big antenna.