Patrick Norton Shows you how to make a simple WiFi antenna booster. This booster is a parabolic reflector made to focus a signal so it is stronger and can project farther. This is perfect if your wireless router is awkward and cannot broadcast a wifi signal to the. Find great deals on eBay for wifi antenna hack. Shop with confidence. Skip to main content. EBay: Shop by category. 1 product rating - Xiaomi WiFi Amplifier 2 Wireless Wi-Fi Repeater 2 Router Extender Antenna Y5Q5. Was: Previous Price $6.09. Buy It Now +$0.99 shipping.
Back in 2007, Stathack rented an apartment in Thailand. This particular apartment didn’t include any Internet access. It turned out that getting a good connection would cost upwards of $100 per month, and also required a Thai identification card. Not wanting to be locked into a 12-month contract, Stathack decided to build himself a to get free WiFi from a shop down the street. The three main components of this build are a USB WiFi dongle, a baby bottle, and a parabolic Asian mesh wire spoon. The spoon is used as a reflector.
The means that it will reflect radio signals to a specific focal point. The goal is to get the USB dongle as close to the focal point as possible. Stathack did a little bit of math and used a Cartesian equation to figure out the optimal location. Once the location was determined, Stathack cut a hole in the mesh just big enough for the nipple of the small baby bottle. The USB dongle is housed inside of the bottle for weatherproofing. A hole is cut in the nipple for a USB cable. Everything is held together with electrical tape as needed.
Stathack leaves this antenna on his balcony aiming down the street. He was glad to find that he is easily able to pick up the WiFi signal from the shop down the street. He was also surprised to see that he can pick up signals from a high-rise building over 1km away. Not bad for an antenna made from a spoon and a baby bottle; plus it looks less threatening than. Posted in Tagged, Post navigation. Reflector antennas are much more forgiving than a waveguide antenna.
The critical point in the cantenna is the coupler between the coax from the card and the waveveguide (soup can). A reflector, as long as it has nog holes larger than about of 10th of the wavelength will reflect the signal. The feeding antenna in the dongle is probably ill shaped, as it will be omni directional instead of aiming the signal at the reflector, but it will still work, albeit with a distorted radiation pattern and somewhat less gain in the broadside direction. Im a little sick of seeing “Super simple and cheap directional antenna!!!” everywhere. Almost anything metal works as an antenna, and placing grounded metal stuff behind it gives it some level of rejection to background signal, but this designs are not really a parabolic antenna.
A parabolic antenna needs a real parabolic reflector with a real calculated shape, and an absolutely exact location for the antenna in the focal point of the parabola, everything else is an “antenna with metal behind that kinda gets wifi signal”, but no more than that. The benefits of WokFI are well documented. Once upon a time in college without money for my own broadband, I shared it from a friendly neighbor a thousand or so feet away in another community. I should just submit my old hacks instead of letting my comrades pick from the tips line, here’s mine, a bit more of a hack than the one in the article: So, there’s a lazy susan bearing, an old DirecTV dish from the days before “grey market” satellite receivers became black that everyone then ripped out, a trusty old WRT54G with DD-WRT on it cranked up from 30mW to 250mW (square hole cut and scrap PC fan screwed to the case), and WindSurfer cardboard+gluestick+tinfoil directional antennas.
Gut the feedhorn, point the WIndsurfers back into the dish, flip the dish upsidedown and bolt it to the arm backwards, and have the dish pointed what looks like awkwardly downward (angle is really about 20-30 degrees steeper that what you presume it to be, so the feedhorn doesn’t block line of sight). While I agree with Eduardo to some degree, in this case, close enough is good enough. The design could no doubt be improved and the gain increased by making the spoon “more paraboloc”, but for the wavelengths in question, this rough shape is near enough. If you look at all the bashed and distorted satellite dishes in the world that sitll manage to receive a signal you will realise that there is a fairly large margin of error in a parabolic radio reflector.
Light reflection in a slolar cooker is another example of close enough is good enough. You wouldn’t get away with this much error in a telescope’s optics because you are trying to form a perfect image, but you do in the solar cooker or wifi antenna because you are trying to grab as much energy as possible.
I think the ‘good enough’ is important as it comes down to the required tolerances (if you only need an 80% ‘parabola’ to get enough signal then why work harder?). As I discovered having hammered a squashed satellite dish to what visually approximated a parabola and it worked far better than the flatter version:-) Even with optical quality you’re still only going for good enough (see kit-lens vs Nikkor/Canon-L lens) until you have a reason for needing more (although, much like demanding a perfect parabola spoon in this application, there’s always people demanding perfect results when it’s not required/perceivable). The loss of gain associated with ball-parking the location of the antenna in relation to the reflector is offset by the gain associated with the surface area of the reflector relative to wavelength.
And it doesn’t have to be a parabola. There are many directional gain antenna designs that utilize non-parabolic reflectors. There are box-reflectors, corner reflectors even the common Yagi or log-periodic is an example of this. If you’re going for absolute perfection and absolute maximum gain sure, make a perfect parabola and place the antenna at the focus. But sometimes imperfect is good enough. I have an Alfa with that huge omni antenna. Very disappointing.
As claimed by the websites touting this combo, the sensitivity is incredible, and I can pick up 20-30 APs whereas anything else I have picks up 4-5 max. But sensitivity doesn’t equal selectivity, and with all those AP’s broadcasting over each other, the throughput when an actual connection is made to any of the additional distant APs is near zero. Merely making the AP list is far easier than useful communications, all you need is one uncorrupted SSID packet every few minutes. One of the software utilities recommended by sellers of this combo to display AP lists seems to accept corrupted SSID packets too, leading to a false list numbering in the hundreds, with multiple garbled versions of each AP; so take “Amazing, I can receive ### APs now!” claims with a grain of salt. This setup probably only works when there’s a few APs in the extended range, otherwise you need a directional antenna. I absolutely adore topics like this. When I was much younger I had similar success with a 700Mhz video receiver and an umbrella I had covered with aluminum foil.
I placed the transmitter at extreme range and fiddled with placing the receiver at different points until the signal got better then lopped off the extra handle length and wire-tied the receiver in place. I attached the rig to a camera tripod and kept it pointed at the RC truck the camera and transmitter were mounted to and that was my first foray into ROVs!:D Awesome times.