WIFI range expander?

The restaurant across the road has wifi but the signal is weak here. Is there an antenna or something to strengthen the signal?

You can build a pringles can antenna.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out-of-a-pringles-can-nb/

Grtechguy wrote: You can build a pringles can antenna. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out-of-a-pringles-can-nb/

Essentially you'd be building a directional rx only antenna similar to a TV satellite dish. Keep in mind, WIFI signal diminishes fast and your hard work may not be very fruitful.

He never said it had to be a good, clean signal . Just stronger.

Stronger, but not necessarily good or clean?

CANTENNA! The Viagra for your WIFI signal!

If you have a spare wifi router you can put it closer to the restaurant and use it as a repeater...if not, you can buy/build a cantenna or a high-gain antenna.

I beat my head against the wall trying to do this with the wi-fi in my house. After buying two different products and spending an hour on the phone with "Bob" in India I gave up. Some of it has to do with the fact that my primary router is AT&T provided equipment and requires a lot of massaging to get it to "talk" to another router. Very esoteric stuff.

If you're stealing the restaurant's wifi and don't have access to the settings on the primary router, you might not be able to achieve this at all, though I'm no expert.

Basil, I won't claim it's the best solution but I use two OpenMesh OM2P routers (http://www.open-mesh.com/products.html) to provide dual WiFi access points with the same SSID at my house. You configure them on the net via http://www.cloudtrax.com, hook one into your router (you can shut off the ATT wifi at that point if you want), then put the other elsewhere and they find each other. The outrigger node gets about 1/2 the bandwidth as the directly connected one but that's the only real downside I've found. If you subsequently hard wire the remote node (I used a Cisco Ethernet-over-house-wiring device) it works exactly the same except you don't have the loss of bandwidth and you can move the outrigger node farther away.

You can add as many nodes as you like. You do lose 1/2 the bandwidth at every hop so you can't string them up all the way across town. They are pretty powerful too.

In reply to Basil Exposition:

That's why you disable wifi on the isp router and plug in a good wireless router.

Kenny_McCormic wrote: In reply to Basil Exposition: That's why you disable wifi on the isp router and plug in a good wireless router.

I've looked into that, as well, and, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anything "plug in" about that process, either.

Of course, you're talking to somebody that thinks that computerized fuel injection is the work of the devil and not to be trusted.

You could replace the firmware of your router with new firmware sourced from here:

https://www.dd-wrt.ca/site/

This is open-source (i.e. free) software for updating/replacing the firmware on lots of different models of routers, and may allow you to receive weaker signals or transmit stronger signals. Don't quote me, but I figured I'd share this.

There is a set of plans out there for an antenna that mounts inside an unused satellite tv dish that might work for you.