Journal: Power over ethernet wifi antennas.

When I used to stay in hotel rooms in Portland I ended up doing some pretty creative things in order to maintain an internet conection. I am a smoker you see and the WIFI signal on the higher up smoking floor was no good. So i ended up suspending 15 stories above the ground: 1 802.11b to Ethernet adaptor with power cord, 1 Airport express wireless base station with power cord and 1 6 inch ethernet patch cable. This arrangment offered the benifit of a wifi antenna that could bounce the signal to where it was needed as well as provide firewall and lan. The connection was secured with WPA Personal. This arrangement worked well in many situations and I ended up taping the rig together for quick deployment and soon started using it in coffee shops to have a secure lan layerd under the existing one. This offered the benifit of being able to wirelessly communicate with other clients without putting a load on the main network as well as maintain a high level of security by layering additional protocols. The point of this is that I would like to put the idea out there to have a small 802.11 to rj45 adaptor that is basicially an antenna on one end and an ethernet plug on the other. The device would draw its power from the ethernet jack thus eliminating any unneccicary cables. There may already be a product like this and if so let me know. But if not this seems like a really good idea, feel free to use it. -Cow