The patch antenna wins by a narrow margin in terms of range. Then I started walking towards my AP with each antenna until ministumbler detected it. First walked far enough from my house that none of the antennas could pick up my AP. Next, I did a ministumbler AP detection test. The signal strength and SNR w/ the patch antenna were anywhere from 1-3dB better than w/ my Hunts beans waveguide 'cantenna' after adjusting pointing each one optimally. First I tried to use ministumbler as a signal strength meter, but the numbers were fluctuating too much to get stable results. Lacking any decent test equipment, I've only done some qualitative tests with this antenna, and it seems to have decent gain. In retrospect, hot melt glue is probably not a good idea a hot car baking in the sun easily gets it gooey enough for everything to just fall apart. Hopefully, they still have them if not, any decent electronic supply store should carry them. I bought mine at Rat Shack when I was a kid. First, you drill a hole with the best matched bit you have, and then ream it out to the exact size you want with this:

Here is a handy tool for making odd-sized round holes. It's a pretty messy job I did, partly because I didn't have much time and built the thing in a rush, and partly because I wanted to demonstrate what a rip-off commercial antennas are that even with crude and imprecise contruction techniques and unglamorous materials, you can get decent performance. The whole assembly is contained inside a compact (4x4') plastic food container. Hot melt glue holds everything together except for the N jack, which is soldered on. I'm not sure how good the dielectric constant of cheap plastic pens is, but it's the only thing I had handy last night that's what I used as a spacer for patch and ground plane. I cut all the parts with a pair of tin snips (actually it took me longer to hunt down a screw in my garage to fix my broken snips than it took to make everything!). I used the lid from a fisherman's friend tin (nasty menthol mints) for the patch and a piece of scrap galvanized steel for the ground plane. I won't go into details about dimensions since they are well documented at the above link. Here is a local mirror: Inside the Comtelco 7.5dBi. (Update 20051106: the site seems to be down. Below is a summary of my experiences in building the patch Comtelco 7.5dBi patch antenna posted by outcast_one and otaku42 at

Wifi patch antenna