Wireless Booster?

[orbsycli]

Anyone know of any inexpensive ways to boost wireless network connections?

[Buffy]

There are antennas you can plug into Airports (which being Apple equipment are not cheap), but I think you need to replace your wireless router if you want better reception. I was in Fry's last week and noticed something called a "wireless amplifier" but didn't look closely other than to note a price over $50, and who knows what it does....

Note that these wireless routers really don't work anywhere near the range they claim in a lot of cases. My mom's house has chicken wire and hand plaster walls, and you can't get more than one wall away without losing the wireless signal even if its only 20 feet or so.

YMMV,
Buffy

[orbsycli]

Consciousness:

Antenna on the Cheap (er, Chip)

[Buffy]

Ha ha! Looks like a tin can and a piece of string! It worked when I was a kid!

I am *not* a hardware person for a good reason....

I just drive em,
Buffy

[Fatstep]

This sounds nice, I know our school has something like this, but it is $300, not what I'd call inexpensive.

♠ WiFi | Wireless Amplifier

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by orbsycli

Antenna on the Cheap (er, Chip)

Skimming the article, I spotted something interesting

Remember that the can is polarized, so match the phase of the antenna you're talking to (for example, if shooting at an omni, be sure the element is on the bottom or the top of the can, or you won't be able to see it!)

Wondering if all 2.4-2.5 GHz wifi antennas are polarized, I tried opening some uncached webpages while holding my laptop sideways. All worked fine. Upon reflection, the floppy little rubberized antennae on most routers and desktop wifi cards seem to work find no matter how they’re oriented.

These antennae aren’t exactly like the directional “shotgun” ones Rob Flickenger and friends built, which got me to wondering – could a simple omnidirectional but polarized replacement antenna for a cheap home wifi router boost its signal strength enough to penetrate more of Buffy’s mom’s chicken-wire and plaster Faraday cage walls, or other typical home trouble spots. (I’ve a friend who swears that moving his laptop to a point with a big cast-iron bathtub between it and the router kills the connection, though the one time I tried to duplicate it with my much wimpier handheld, I couldn’t find this alleged blindspot) Seems like a good idea, as I don’t really need to be able to use my laptop while lying on my side, back, etc.

My chief cheap router gripe is that answering one of our 2.4 gHz cordless phones (a nice headset phone) is a bit like Russian roulette – sometimes it kills one channel of wifi. My wife has gotten used to quickly hitting the phone’s channel button when she hears me shriek about losing my connection to some of the finicky apps that blow up if they lose the post of their host (upon which, unfortunately, my livelihood depends). Most of them have about a 10-20 second window where shrieking and channel switching can save them. What should happen is the phone notice that the channel it’s picked isn’t clear, and use another. One phone (a cheap handheld) does this, but the other doesn’t – I suspect, because my cheap router isn’t putting out enough signal for it to notice.

[GAHD]

I beleive the answer lies in coils.

[Jay-qu]

I find wireless reception a very odd thing.. I think a/g/b all have different problems.

A few oddities I have encountered:
-placing a laptop between my laptop and the router kills my connection
-with the router antenna in vertical position | second story reception is dismal but in an angled / position it is greatly improved
-i was told it would not penetrate my brick wall, but it did..
-WPA has less drop outs than WEP
-when I have more than 1 laptop connected to the router dropouts are increased (virtually non with just the one laptop)

[alexander]

Jay, please dont shrink the field. All wireless protocols have problems and the least of them are in the transmission and radio frequency they use.

The thing that pisses me off is all the radio communications all run in 2.4 GHz range... Cell Phones, regualar wireless handsets, 802.11 a/b/g/n... everything uses that range. We are already seeing the concequences of that, as more and more, when installing wireless networks we have to look at the 2.4 ghz band that is already being used and try to not cause any interfearence. Is there no other range we can use....?

Range extending? Well to what extent and on which side in which direction?

You can use antennas to extend ranges of your APs, but there are drawbacks. The higher gain, more narrower the field of effective communication is vertically. Then there are walls to consider, radio signals may reflect and refract just like any other wave, causing connectivity issues and interfearence. Any electromagnetic devices such as microwaves or ham radios will cause interfearance. In my experience that getting 5.5 dbi antennas (with a gain of 7.4036) for the router is the best median between range, and the width of the radiation pattern.

A really bad way to extend your range is to hack the Linksys router and install DDWRT or any other OpenSource firmware on it, and use one of the infty options to bring up the signal power on the transmitter. That is REALLY BAD. There is a reason Cisco's sister company sets the transmitters to a certain power value, if you dramatically increase the power output of the transmitter you increase noise and that is BAD.

If you need to extend range in one direction or anothe side of your house, you may just want to get a repeater, that basically repeats any wireless signals it hears and works great if you have a wide area to cover and dont want to put up extra APs (they can get expensive).

On the card side, there are things you can do too.
Chances are that your laptop does not have an antena out port you can use to connect an antenna to conveniently (if you do, you are the luckiest man alive)
Your choices: get a wireless card and hack it to be able to connect an external antenna to it. Or just get a wireless card, like the Buffalo gold card, that already has such a port; at which point you can get a coffee can antenna or a yaggi that will give you up to and over 14 dbi of gain (and availability to see networks miles away, literaly), but those are directional, or you can get a 3-6 dbi gain omni and even a little mounting kit for it for your laptop.

Desktops should not run wireless to begin with, but basically the same rules apply as for the laptops...

[Jay-qu]

Originally Posted by alexander

Jay, please dont shrink the field.

What do you mean?

Also what do you think of directional antenna's?