Here's a little report on a very simple and cheap Wi-Fi booster, born out of necessity.
Sorry for my not so well refined English!
See from where the
flower part in the name came from!
From the side. The end of the USB extension cable is fixed with scotch to the coke clip.
At least!
NetStumbler show some signal!
I found myself in need to share a connection with a friend on the other side of a road in a urban, highly populated environment. With the access point on my friend's house, and my cheap USB Wi-Fi header there were no way to get a bare minimum of usable signal, no matter how I tried to position the header.
So, remembering having seen some "crazy antenna setup" (in the good sense! see
here!) obtained from spare / common parts, I started to look around trying to find something useful. My eyes stopped on a Coca Cola can.
First things first: I had to empty that. No problem!
Then I cut out the bottom with a knife, positioned the USB header on the inside (it was larger than hole), connected to the USB extension cable and fixed both of them with some paper scotch. Then I started
NetStumbler and started to pointing the thing around the line of sight to my friend's house. The graph started to show some green bar, but the signal level was too low to be usable.
So, I tried another option. With a pair of scissors I cut 8 stripes on the can, and bended them in a funnel shape.
Reconnected all the things, restarted pointing the antenna and, after some tries... Voil?! Green bars galore!
Although the signal level was still relatively low, the network connection worked well enough to share a broadband Internet connection.
Totally empiric, hardly very scientific, ultra cheap, fast to build, but nonetheless good enough for me in that situation. Hope this can be useful to someone!
If by any chance you'll try a similar setup, please post some feedback!
Bye!
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