I bought a sorta old-school looking TV antenna for my trailer at camp. In the past I have been able to get one fuzzy channel, so I thought if I got a good antenna I could get more. Well, now I still get the same channel, its just clearer. It is the antenna in the photo below. It is described as suitable for VHF, UHF, FM, and AM. It has a coax cable. It was a whole $18.99, so no big loss.
I also have a wifi booster. There is a Nano broadcaster at the lodge and I only get one or two bars up here, so the booster is trying to boost next to nothing and it only works sporadically.
Soooo.... my brain is wondering if this rooftop antenna would be a good way to get some good gain on the wifi signal.
The booster does not have provisions for an external antenna, so I would either have to: 1) hack into this box and try to isolate the internal antenna, blah, blah... not a wise option. 2) get a box with an external antenna option and find some way to convert from coax to whatever input it has to hook up this antenna. 3) go from this antenna to a cantenna pointing at the booster, or 4) discover that I'm an idiot and this antenna won't have any effective wifi gain. (sorry for the fuzzy pic... it was dusk)
I'm going with "No."
I've been buying these:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JGULMHU?psc=1
They have a little gain over a standard wifi antenna on the back of a router. Not the 13 advertised. When I looked closely at them, I realized that they were built all wrong. The feed point is on the wrong side for where the elements are. I drill the pop rivets out, drill new holes on the other side and pop rivet the feed element there, closer to in line with the reflector/director elements. I picked up close to 5 DB doing that over how it came. There's other problems too, but that gets me close enough. You can also solder your own coax to the feed elements and then run that to whatever you want. I do that with Linksys WRT54G or GS routers running DD-WRT. Doing it that way, you can make a WiFi repeater with the antenna pointing at your source. Note that this is not a beginner project. The whole DD-WRT thing is somewhat confusing. I bricked one or two routers. I have about 15 routers on my network, which I refer to as "The Gordian Network," after the knot.
Wrong kind of antenna for Wi-Fi. Most Wi-Fi is in the gigahertz range, TV and FM are in the megahertz range.
Duke
MegaDork
8/6/15 9:26 p.m.
www.l-com.com - these guys are awesome. And if you can't figure out what you need, call them up and they'll walk you through it.
Don't think that antenna will do any good...the good news is that you can build a cantenna, or mod an old satellite dish into a parabolic antenna, for about the same amount of work that would be required to attach this VHF antenna to your wifi adapter.
Edit: Check this out:
https://www.hackthissite.org/articles/read/1129
That site is crack for me. I can't quit reading.
If its rated for UHF, then yes, conceivably it can pick up WIFI, but only B/G i think is in the UHF spectrum. A and N are above 3ghz
These days everything is N or AC.
but not only N or AC.
basically an antennae like this would be useful if you really needed to extend range in an environment where higher frequencies of N are being interfered with for some reason.
