rootninja

If you have two antennae or perhaps three (I’ve not tried this with one of those tri-tenna routers) on your 802.11a/b or 802.11g router, replace one with a direction antenna. You could do both if you want, but leaving the other as a omni-directional pole should give you a broad area of coverage while the directional antenna serves to extend your wifi range to those badly needed areas such as your backyard or that room down the hall and around the corner. If you have a 802.11n or pre-n router, they may use some funky methods of combining the signals of multiple antennae for optimal speed. But when your WAN connection is 3 Meg up and 16 meg down, is it really going to matter if you connect and 10, 100, or more? So this might not work for a FreeNAS setup or streaming movies to that corner room, but for a basic connection to get you on the interwebs, this’ll do the trick.

If you only have one antenna, crack open the plastic casing on your router and look for a little socket for a second antenna. It’s cheaper for manufacturers to produce one hardware design and just downgrade the hardware to make more than one model than it is to have multiple, completely different designs. Think of it like those old video cards with half of the pipelines disconnected, where all you needed to do was draw a connection with a number two pencil to enable the card to run at its full potential. The extra plug inside the router housing is called lpex or U.FL depending on which manufacturer makes your hardware. You should be able to add a pigtail adaptor to extend the port to the outside of your case.

A simple tin can or pringles can antenna will do the trick, or you can spend more and get a nice professional looking one. If all else fails and you really want that ghetto look, try making a parabolic reflector to put on your omni-directional antenna. I’ve made a few of these with mixed results. I have one that extends my range at least double, while two others don’t seem to do anything but degrade the signal, however, they look physically identical. So good luck!