I'm in my big shop out in the country.
And I've got Internet access here but it's kind of flaky.
The people that live in the house on the property
have been kind enough to share their wifi password with me.
But I'm a bit far from the house. And inside this metal building
the signal really doesn't travel very well.
So, I bought an external wifi adapter that I hooked up to my laptop.
And if I put that on the window I can get the signal.
But just barely.
So what I've set up is this tin foil covered piece of Styrofoam
as a reflector to go behind this wifi adapter. And that way
it catches the signal not just coming directly but also the reflection.
And that makes a big difference. Although the placement of this reflector
is very critical. So, I'm testing how good the signal is
by sending 1,000 byte ping packets
directly to their router rather than to the Internet.
And right now, a lot of packets are taking about 50 milliseconds.
Now, you can see quite a lot of variation. But we're still getting pings
down to 20-30 milliseconds sometimes. Sometimes probably it's busy
but the next thing is let's try removing that reflector
and see what happens to the ping times.
Moving it now.
And we've just missed one. And the times are substantially larger.
So, clearly that reflector makes a difference
to how well the signal gets through.
Now, how far I put this from the antenna is very critical.
If I put it just the wrong distance then the reflection off of this tin foil
will destructively cancel with the antennas from here and it won't go anywhere so
putting this reflector behind it can actually sometimes make it worse.
And if I put it in the right position
it makes it a lot better than no reflector.
And now I'm getting sometimes as low as 11 milliseconds.
Because I've gotten fancier with the reflector.
What I've played around with is something that's more of a dish reflector
with the antenna in the middle right there.
This is a very precarious arrangement and
it's easy to just knock things out of place.
So, I think what I'll make is a stand to hold that dish and
the wifi adapter in the right position with each other.
Let's hope that right about here will be close.
I'm probably able to slide this.
I need to put this here so this...
I think the antenna should be fairly far in there because to the extent
that this is like a parabola. If the thing comes here and reflects like so
We gotta be about this far in. So, right about there.
I hope.
So, with a bit of tweaking I'm now getting ping times.
Quite often in the 10 millisecond range.
So, that's my wifi directional range extender.
'Cause Pringle cans are for amateurs.