Anybody bought any of the Yagi's/high gaina antenna's from DealExtreme?

[hppd]

What do you think about them?

I was thinking about buying one of these 2.
http://dx.com/p/2-4ghz-16dbi-directional-high-gain-16-unit-antenna-for-wifi-wireless-network-rp-sma-33016

http://dx.com/p/rp-sma-male-2-4ghz-13-unit-20dbi-directional-high-gain-antenna-for-wi-fi-router-silver-black-161545

[Snayler]

Never tried the first one, but the second one is not worth it. Not to mention you can find them on ebay for around 6 bucks.

I have an hand made one, 16dBi and it outperforms that chinese model by miles. But for 6 bucks, I was expecting that, and it still works as a directional antenna.

Reviews on the first one are not so good, IIRC.

[hppd]

So you made the other one yourself or you bought it handmade? How much did you spend on it?

[karsa]

Looks like those are the same ones you can get from ebay etc. Some say they're shit, some say they're good for the price (not so shit, but still shit) while some say they're actually pretty good. I've seen people saying that the build quality isn't nearly as good as it looks in the pictures... go figure  .

I wanted to buy the 16dBi but said fuck it, and built one myself. You can build it in an hour, from planning to hooking it up to a wireless card. The calculations are easy and there are many calculators online. There's really three things to be careful about: precision cutting of the elements and their spacing on the beam as well as carefully bending the reflector. I used an RG-58 coax and it worked well. The results are not stellar, but slightly better than a cantenna.

Tl;dr you get what you pay for. The only real improvement I've seen is with grid dish antennas but those usually go for about 3x the price of the ones you listed. There are a few other options like a corner or biquad dish antennas if you're into diy.

[Snayler]

So you made the other one yourself or you bought it handmade? How much did you spend on it?

Bought it from a German vendor on eBay. It originally came with a 2 meter long cable, which I cut and re-soldered to prevent signal losses. Spent about 20€ at the time.