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.
6 thoughts on “WiFi Telescope”
Leave a Reply
Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)
That is not a Yagi antenna.
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
Cool idea, but 30° isn’t really much of a “telescope”.
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…
This site shows us nothing DIY for us to make or modify or hack on our own. This is not a hack!
*confused*
Build a high gain directional WiFi antenna for around $15
http://tonynazzal.blogspot.com/2008/06/build-high-gain-directional-wifi.html