Fooling around with another wifi card mod Linksys AE1000

Nothing is better to improve wifi connectivity than a good antenna!!

My friend AB needs a way to optimize his 2 streams wifi card the Linksys AE1000 to his powerful MSM460, the internal antennas kind of suck! So we decide to mod the card with our wifi junk yard, and yes we do have a real wifi junk yard.

This card is dualband so yes we put an ok gain dualband antenna!

I did the solderering while AB did the mechanical design to hold the antenna in place!

Here is the pictures of our mod.

Since the AE1000 is a a 802.11n 2 streams, there are two antennas printed on the PCB.

So first remove the test RF connector, be careful not not to destroy the PCB trace.

Remove also the SMD cap as shown on the picture, cut the trace of the PCB antenna and solder the coax/pigtail.

When unsoldering, apply generously flux.

Do both side as there are two antennas.

Final result!

Linksys AE1000 mod

Solid 2 streams 300mpbs

Fooling around with “Design of the antenna FA20”

Many years ago 2007 I saw this patch array antenna the FA20 from a russian forum http://www.lan23.ru/wifi/fa20en.html, I really like the design.

I went on simulating it in Ansoft Designer 3 just to see how it performs, WOW super gain 18dbi and VSWR 1.25 accross wifi channel 1-11.  During xmas 2007 I decided to craft this antenna, I did not use the same material as the original author, I used brass sheet from http://www.deserres.ca/ a craft art product store, brass very easy to cut and solder to build the array, the idea to use brass sheet came from one of my hardware engineer colleague “wilfred”, he kind of knows my passion to build antenna.

I “borrowed” without permission a cookie sheet from the “wife” as my ground plane, she was not really happy but the wrath only last a day.  the nice thing about the cookie sheet is the border is already bent as the original FA20 design.

I used double-sided tape to get the 7mm distance between the ground plane and the patch.

FA-20 schematic

I stored my Ansoft Designer simulation else where among the mess of USB drives (next fooling would be setting up a NAS), if I happen to find the simulation files I will post them here later.

When all is done, I plug the antenna to my Dlink WNA1330  PCcard Atheros AR5212 (already mod with a pigtail), by the way this card is super easy to add your pigtail.  My jaw was falling when I saw the signal gain in Netstumbler!!  This card has antenna diversity so you much disable the antenna diversity switching and force the card to use antenna 1 (in my card mod), if you choose to tap on the other antenna then choose 2. Under linux using madwifi-ng you can change antenna diversity using sysctl, under Windows XP there is some registry keys you need to edit manually under your adapter NDIS setting, it took me awhile to figure out the one for XP.

Years later I had the chance to buy an Agilent Fieldfox Network/Spectrum Analyzer for my job, I quickly measured the VSWR and the result is stunning 1.2 VSRW from channel 1 to 11, it kind of confirm the simulation results.  Kudo to the russian author!!

I  nick name the FA20 as the “cookie sheet” antenna!  Anyway, just post this blog to share this antenna construction, as you can see, the construction looks sloppy/flimsy but performance wise it is real good.  I don’t see elsewhere on the net.

If you happen to build the FA20 the way I did, just post some feedback just to see how you did it.