PC Peripherals Directional Wi-Fi antennas (DIY or otherwise)

[m1tr]

My wifi router is in my living room and for a variety of reasons can't be relocated elsewhere. Although I have good coverage everywhere in my house by using an older router as a range extender, it seems very wasteful that 50% of the main router's power is wasted blasting out signal away from my house.

Is there any way I can replace the omnidirectional antennas with directional ones (old timers may remember the DIY windsurfer from way back) so that my wifi signal is more "concentrated" within my house and less so outside it?

 

[vivek.krishnan]

No, would suggest to change location of it or add an AP or mesh. Some people are selling the decos cheap, YMMV

 

[m1tr]

No, would suggest to change location of it or add an AP or mesh. Some people are selling the decos cheap, YMMV

Hi, are you referring to the tp link deco?

 

[vivek.krishnan]

Hi, are you referring to the tp link deco?

Yes. Whichever fits your budget - deco from tplink/tenda/iball

 

[m1tr]

Yes. Whichever fits your budget - deco from tplink/tenda/iball

I know mesh is the way to go but wanted to see how far I can go with the DIY approach.

 

[vivek.krishnan]

I know mesh is the way to go but wanted to see how far I can go with the DIY approach.

You can try, but mesh is truly enjoyable. Had the same issue as yours, corner of the house router, horrible wifi. Moved to mesh.

 

[salian]

I had printed a 3D printable directional antenna for accessing farther-off wi-fi signals and it worked well.

3D-Printed a Parabolic WiFi Booster Antenna (2.4 GHz) for better signal.

Wifi routers typically come with short omnidirectional antennas. Technically speaking these are called vertical sleeve dipoles and have 360-degree coverage in the shape of a medu-wada, assuming the antenna runs through the hole in the vada. At times it might be useful to have a directional...

techenclave.com

 

[m1tr]

I had printed a 3D printable directional antenna for accessing farther-off wi-fi signals and it worked well.

3D-Printed a Parabolic WiFi Booster Antenna (2.4 GHz) for better signal.

Wifi routers typically come with short omnidirectional antennas. Technically speaking these are called vertical sleeve dipoles and have 360-degree coverage in the shape of a medu-wada, assuming the antenna runs through the hole in the vada. At times it might be useful to have a directional...

techenclave.com

Haha the windsurfer I was talking about is essentially the 20 year old version of this, except the backing is simple cardboard instead of filament!

Do you have any signal strength measurements for before/after?

 

[salian]

I had made it for exploring the radio environment around me, and I was able to see many more networks around me, IIRC around 3x more from a ~150m radius than without this antenna.

Earlier I could only see some of the farther off SSIDs but not capture useful handshakes, while with this booster on my antenna it was possible to drop connections as well as capture packets for further processing, so the antenna was quite successful for my use case.