Passive repeaters
Passive repeaters are the panacea of the 802.11b wireless community at the moment. A repeater is something that will relay a signal to make it travel further or go around corners or large objects, etc. Normally a repeater requires some form of power to do this and this type is known as an active repeater. However, there was some furore caused in the community when a chap called Bob Cringley wrote an article about how he constructed such a passive repeater with a couple of antennae placed back-to-back and not even physically connected. So far Bob Cringley has failed to demonstrate his passive repeater working to anybody else and, (to our knowledge), no-one has succeeded in proving his claim. In addition, there is some speculation amongst the wireless community that his success may not have had anything to do with his repeater whatsoever.
We are simply stating that we have experienced some rather bizarre results when aligning the wave-guide antennae on the houses, with the sector antenna at the community centre. We found that, at a distance, the signal we got when pointing the wave-guide towards the local church, (which is in range of the sector antenna), was actually better than when pointing it directly at the sector. It should be noted that the church had clear line of site between both antennae, whereas between the sector and the wave-guide there was at least one house roof partially obscuring the signal path.
Apart from the general observation that radio waves can do very peculiar things when put into open air with obstacles, it is difficult to ascertain quite what is happening. We can only conclude that the church was acting as a form of passive repeater. We plan to do further studies on this and come up with more conclusive results. As passive repeaters are a reality at other frequencies / powers and we are currently experiementing with the design and construction of a mountable version.
(с)
http://flakey.info/clan/#passive не помню откуда
