Home Brewing - Well, besides the obvious meaning of making one's one favourite amber fluid in the back shed, home brewing also means constructing one's own equipment at home, rather than purchasing off the shelf components.

In the case of wireless networking, ACA regulations prohibit home brewing of the active components of the network (i.e. network cards, amplifiers and the RF portions of access points - we are allowed to make APs out of a Linux box and a type approved 802.11b card, of course).  However, one significant component of the wireless network that can be homebrewed is the [Antenna].

Directional antennas such as the YagiAntenna and ParabolicAntenna are easy to homebrew, and the [Cantenna] is ridiculously easy to make.  A few OmniAntenna designs are floating around, but none we've seen are yet good enough for our purposes (but, hey, experiment some more). Happy homebrewing! :-)

A Slotted [WaveGuide] is relatively easy to make, and provide very good performance for an Omni antenna, as well as being relatively compact.

Even easier is the [PatchAntenna] from (http://www.rc-cam.com/gp_patch.htm this site)

[APInABox] and [WeatherProofing] show examples of how to put an [AccessPoint Access Point] in a weatherproof box.  You can then mount it on your mast to minimise the amount of [CoaxialCable] needed.

You can then HomeBrew your own [PoE Power-Over-Ethernet] to remotely power your weatherproof Access Point.

Oh, and if you indulge in the other form of homebrewing, don't forget to invite all the (/wiki/?Members Melb Wireless People) around to sample your work! :-) (Funnily enough - some tins of ingredients for the _other_ Homebrewing are close to the size we look for in cans... - JamesHealy)