D.I.Y. Wifi Booster

In the past few months, I’ve had to endure some pretty annoying hiccups on my home’s wifi network. To better illustrate the problem, my setup consists of a wireless (g) router placed in the middle of our living room where the primary phone line drops in. This should theoretically ensure the cleanest signal from the DSL line (nearest point of entry) and the widest coverage, being that the living room is roughly at the midpoint between room A (where our desktop unit is located) and room B (where we usually operate our laptop). Throw in the fact that both rooms are barely 30 feet away from the router’s location and you’d think the entire apartment would be blanketed in full wifi bliss.

Alas, reality rarely follows theory. Imagine my disappointment when I checked the connection on my desktop and found one measly bar of signal strength. I was getting 1 to 11 Mbps max network speed consistently (from a 54 Mbps g-class router). WTF. I tinkered with the settings on my router, hoping to get any possible boost. Switched the channels, changed the protocols, moved the antennas into strange angles. Still no relief found. The room where the laptop is located fared a little better, getting full 54 Mbps speeds but also just barely getting 2 bars of signal.

Resigning myself to the fact that it won’t matter much since my DSL subscription doesn’t even touch 500 Kbps anyway, I bit the bullet. In retrospect, I should have realized that wifi coverage would be compromised, as the connecting machines were not really line-of-sight with the access point. Add to that the fact that the walls separating the aforementioned rooms are mostly concrete, so it’s understandable that the router’s reach would be reduced.

I would have kept settling with the setup that I had but, in the past month, my desktop’s connection got even worse. The signal kept getting dropped leading to broken downloads and incomplete web pages. It got so bad that I rarely used the desktop for anything that required connecting to the Internet. Which was doubly bad because the main hard drive containing most of my data was connected to it.

So off I went, looking for a possible (low-cost) solution to my problem online. Then I stumbled upon this clip on YouTube:

Sounded simple enough. Intrigued, I followed the link to the site where they said you could download the template for it (www.freeantennas.com). There’s actually a whole bunch of other sites that feature slightly different DIY parabolic boosters, but I felt this one required less effort (hey I’m lazy like that) and was cheaper to build. With a couple of sheets of board paper, some moldy Reynolds aluminum wrap (don’t ask), a glue stick, and my trusty Exact-o knife, I went to work. I won’t go into specifics anymore since the site with the template pretty much explains how it’s done.

How did it go? Well, it was surprisingly a little bit harder to put together than claimed (mine kept popping out of shape despite the taped slots). But once it was installed, it sure made it worth the effort. The signal readings from my desktop climbed to 2 bars, and I was getting around 18-48 Mbps connection speeds. More importantly, the signal wasn’t getting dropped like before. So now, I’ve resumed downloading doing online stuff on my desktop. This post included