DIY antennae

[sh_ithe_ad]

I don't know exactly how antennas work but wouldn't it be possible to increase your wireless signal by modifying the antennas on your router? When I say modify I mean add onto it. Attaching wire or aluminum foil to it for example. Sorry in advance if anything I'm saying here is ridiculous. Again I don't know how antennas work this is just a thought.

[Thor]

No it's not ridiculous. That is something that alot of hardware hackers do. Of course depending on your knowledge of electronics you will be left with two ways to do this:

1) pop open your router and de-solder your antenna and then solder on a longer antanna wire. You will find that under the casing it's really an "REF" cable wire. Available at radio shack. This will increase you propagation zone slightly and increase the distance you can receive slightly.

2) For bigger boost you are gonna need to research your router a little. Or study the board. I can tell you without looking that the way boosting essentially works is that you increase the amount of power driving the the antenna (increasing the Gain).

3) Yes I said two ways, but you can lookup and see if there is modified firmware for your router. (hacked firmware) and download that as an upgrade to your router.

This should get you started on things to Google to hack your router.

[sh_ithe_ad]

I don't have any experience with electronics but know a fair bit of the theory and I'm always running into problems I know I can fix with a soldering pen. Its about time I bought a soldering pen. Don't know much about firmware though I'll look into that.

I was trying to figure out how to increase my friends wireless signal a while ago since his router only has 1 antenna and I found this
http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/te ... index.html
not a bad trick especially if you just wanna share your wireless network with one of your neighbours.

[Thor]

Or if you want to make your wireless router their new wireless access point and intercept packets. When buying a soldering iron make sure to not cheap out to much as the store bought ones alot of times don't get hot enough to do some good soldering. But may be good enough to do jobs here and there. I guess my best advice is to get the one that had the highest wattage rating that you can afford.