DIY Friday: WiFi Signal Amplifier

This rocket scientist has recently discovered the joys of a Verizon Aircard while traveling. No more dropping $10 extra bucks in a $200 a night hotel just to get online, or wrestling with the credit card at the airport to check your email between flights. It’s liberating, and wonderful, and somewhat akin to magic.

That said,  my personal plan is $50+ per month, and whenever I use the wireless broadband these days, it seems there’s a freely availably wifi service just out of reach. If only my wifi receiver were better, I might be able to save even that dough.

Which brings us to today’s edition of DIY Friday, and that rugged little gizmo to the left, which looks like a cross between a Glade Plugin and the valve on my gas grill:

 

Most laptops nowadays have a mini PCI Wi-Fi card hooked to an antenna which is located inside a screen plastic cover on the laptop. I was browsing eBay recently and noticed that there were some Wi-Fi amplifiers available that promoted themselves as improving the reception of the signal. Sadly most of those amplifiers are designed to be hooked to a PCMCIA type card or a router! None of them seemed to be specifically made for a mini PCI card.

I decided to buy a Wi-Fi amplifier and hook it to my laptop. I have an ASUS A2H laptop with a Dell 1470 a/b/g Wi-Fi mini PCI card inside, I bought the card for $20 off of eBay. I bought the amplifier for $118, it is a 500 mw bi-directional amplifier called "turbo tenna", the amplifier was shipped from Hong Kong and I received it shortly after ordering on eBay.

 

 A nip and tuck of a wire here and there, and the author of the piece found "a dramatic increase in signal strength! More than -80dBm, and the speed of the connection is 24Mbps with signal strength 34% as compared to the same connection at 1% previously tested. You can also see more Wi-Fi connections around you, though of course they’re all password protected."

 But hey — it’s not $50 a month, either.