A new use for Tetrapak – a waveguide antenna

In its early days, Bristol Wireless relied heavily on ‘homebrew’ equipment, such as the whisky tin wifi antenna (cantenna), some of which has survived very well (news passim). We were therefore very interested to hear that, at the recent hackerspace.net 08 festival in Paris, Benjamin Henrion from Belgium’s Reseau citoyen.be was presenting a waveguide antenna made from Tetrapak packaging, which is reputed to be notoriously difficult to recycle*.

More images and brief instructions are available on this page, which also has a link to a real monster antenna in Thailand.

* = Editor’s note: Tetrapak collection and recycling has just started in Bristol. However, its environmental friendliness may be less than optimum as the collected packaging has to be shipped to Scandinavia for processing🙁

Hat tip: global.freifunk.net