Is a Wifi antenna any useful?

[ArkTex]

Hey all,

I have this old wifi antenna that is just now sitting around collecting dust. The connectors are SMA, and I thought they could be of use to try, since I have two SDRs and there are two wires leading to the dual antenna housing.

Is there any practical applications that I could use these for? I'd rather not throw them away if they could be useful. Thanks.

 

[alabamarailfan]

Double check the connector as most Wi-Fi antennas use reverse polarity SMA. If it has a socket in the middle of the SMA instead of a pin, it is RPSMA and would not work with your SDR, which requires a standard SMA connector.

An article that explains this:

Be an RC god | Understanding FPV connectors: SMA vs RP-SMA | GearBest Blog

When you're buying or upgrading a new antenna, transmitter or receiver system for your FPV gear, it's useful to distinguish between SMA and RP-SMA connectors.

www.gearbest.com

.

 

[mmckenna]

Really only useful for 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz, where the WiFi is. But it won't hurt to try it, who knows, might work well in specific applications.

Also, look at the connectors carefully, some of them use a "reverse polarity" connector, where it's a mix of female and male connector parts.

 

[vagrant]

Even if the SMA connector fits your dongle, does your SDR dongle frequency range cover up to 2.4 GHz, or even 5.8GHz?

I have used external WiFi antennas on laptops. I take apart the laptop and identify the WiFi card and how far the card will be to the edge of the laptop for routing a wire. I then buy an MMCX pigtail with an SMA barrel connector on one end. After drilling a suitable hole on the side of the laptop chassis, I connect the pigtail to the WiFi antenna port and then the external antenna to the SMA. It works much better than the internal antenna.

 

[Dog]

If you have a linux laptop with a wifi dongle that can monitor you can see a lot of wifi information...