High Gain Antennas

[Floppyman]

Hi all,

I'm looking at aquiring a Linksys "G" router sometime next year. To increase the coverage area, I was also thinking of getting a pair of high gain antennas Linksys sells. The RF output on the Linksys WRT54G is listed as 18 dBm, while the gain the antennas provide is 7 dBi. Can somewhat explain to me this means? Also, and I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, if you place one of these routers with high gain antennas into a bed room, is there any health risk? Or, is it the case that even with the high gain antennas the output signal is still weak enough that there is nothing to worry about? I'm not sure whether these high gain antennas were meant only for a commercial-type environment with no people close by or not. Thanks in advance for the help.

[bailey]

in my world power out is measured in watts, ant gain is measured in db.
I have no idea what the m,i stand for unless it is so small they had to come up with a new way to measure it.
no there should be no health ill-effects, as the signal is less than what a cell phone puts out.
and the range is usally less than a few hundred feet.

[glc]

http://www.testeq.com/charts/pwrcnv.lasso

Looks like 18 dBm is between 50 and 100 milliwatts. dBm is power expressed logarithmically, with 0 dBm being 1 milliwatt.

Here's something on dBi.

http://www.radarproblems.com/chapter....dir/c06p6.htm

[bailey]

thanks GLC, thats some very interesting things to know.
as most of the stuff I have worked with is between 1 watt and 10,000 watts.
I don't even have any test equipment for working with such low power equipment, as yet, but I am now looking into it a lot deeper, I like doing antenna design and construction for communications.