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You could try and detect just who it is and have a talk with them. Whether it's actually actionable is another thing entirely, but you have to ask yourself whether you'd want to get a kid in trouble with the law. If it is a kid, which isn't unlikely, then making clear, also to the parents, that you'd rather not have them try and force access to your wireless setup is going to be the most effective way.

You are throwing packets in the air on a free-for-all band, after all. You could ask yourself whether you really need to have wifi, for it gives rise to this sort of problem. It's one of the reasons why I prefer wires whenever I can get them, and only turn on the wifi when really needed. But for baseline security, turning WPS off (it's a bad idea done badly), switching to WPA2, regularly swapping out the key, carefully positioning the AP, filtering on MAC, and tricks like that might help too.

Another suggestion: It's easy to turn a simple AP's external antenna into a directional antenna. I've built several and works wonderfully for increasing that signal across the street. Yes, I've mooched off more or less open APs when I didn't have my own network connection available, but never so aggressively as you're describing. Directing the signal away from the street also works reasonably well, though not perfectly. To do it perfectly you'd have to turn the house into a Faraday cage. Turning the AP off is simpler and cheaper and the only definite answer.

Anyway, stack a bunch of those on top of each other and you can make it harder, or even a lot harder, for strangers to try and invite themselves to your wireless network.

"make your router and computers with directional antennas so your gear can just ignore interference. using a phased array antenna"

I've built improvised directional antennas for wifi routers out of cardboard, paper, and aluminum foil. Bend a sheet of aluminum foil on paper (25x15 cm will do) into a curved shape and mount it on the router antenna. Convenient if placing the router in the center of the house is impractical. Because the wavelength is 12 cm at 2.4 GHz it won't generate a tighly focused beam, but it will help reducing interference with transmitters behind the reflector and boost the signal in front.

See e.g. here for inspiration.
http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template/

I'm pretty sure this was covered years ago via http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template/

Also, pretty sure the signal is not amplified, just directed.

It might work, but I built one of the antennas described below for my brother, and the improvement was noticeable in terms of measured signal strength. http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template/

So it would be better with a beer can *and* a couple of pieces of foamcore cut into parabolas...

you could run the freeantennas.com template through your printer, cut out the bits, glue them together, slap a bit of tin foil on the back, and off you go. It really takes less than ten minutes to make one. That's an easy 8..9dB extra gain.

The thing that's critical to beer can and paper-and-tinfoil construction is a reasonable parabolic shape and positioning the antenna at that parabole's focal point. Though a nice square angle will do too, but there again it's the focal point that does it.

even people can block wifi, my router is next to a desktop in the office at the front of the house, normally i get about 75% signal strength, when someone is sitting at that desk it drops down to about 55% to 60% and i notice the slowdown...

this router has a rubber ducky antenna so while searching for a way to improve my signal quality i found this and it really does work, now when someone is sitting at the office desk near the router it does not weaken the signal and the overall signal averages about 85% solid without problems

build one of these out of heavy paper like card stock or similar (cereal box cardboard) and aluminum foil http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template2/

You can find plans for aluminum foil and cardboard reflectors in many places as well. Here's one now!

http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template/

They work great.

You need a Wifi Dish... I carry a OpenWRT 54GL router and a couple of these....

http://www.freeantennas.com/

it's a paper printable parabolic that you can make out of paper and tinfoil or conductive foil tape. work incredibly and in a hotel window I can pick up Open Access points from a good distance. I usually stay in a Motel 6 and borrow the wifi From the Holiday Inn next door.

buddy of mine that is traveling Europe said his is working great in Germany and Italy. Get's him internet access in many hostels that have none.

As previously mentioned, try switching to 5GHz if you can. It won't go through walls, which means that you need to locate the AP carefully to make sure you have coverage where you need it.

Agreed. The 5Ghz spectrum always seems so open and free. Not to mention that 802.11a allows for dozens of *discrete* (read: non-overlapping) channels.

To help with the "not going thru walls well" problem of 802.11a, I've found that a simple reflector placed on every antenna of your WAP can boost your signal by 10 - 12 dB (in a single direction) -- This is enough to make it through walls of a condo. It also helps reduce noise coming into your WAP as well as pick up the signal from your devices better.

They're very simple and cheap to make, too. Instructions can be found at the Free Antennas website. The designs work great for all Wifi standards.

The Tomato firmware lets you scan each channel and identifies all wireless networks (including hidden w/o ssid) before you pick the channel you will use. You can then pick the clearest looking channel. You can also try the Windsurfer http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template2/ which is an aluminum foil antenna you make to better direct your signal.

One assumption you are all making is that he owns all 500 meters of the land between his place and his friend's place.

If you want to go the wireless route, I've had good luck with the antenna "amplifier" I built from this site.

One assumption you are all making is that he owns all 500 meters of the land between his place and his friend's place.

If you want to go the wireless route, I've had good luck with the antenna "amplifier" I built from this site.

Or just some cardboard and tinfoil can make some deflectors for a regular router. I used a pair of these on a stock Linksys WRT54G, pointed them in the direction I wanted, and managed to pick up a signal a kilometer away on an unmodified Toshiba laptop. It wasn't the fastest connection in the world (about the same as dial-up, actually), but over shorter distances and with a bit of tweaking, you might be able to make this work relatively inexpensively.

A couple of WiFi access points. Make sure they have the little "rubber ducky" antennas.

Build four of these:
http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template2/
and apply to the antennas...note the increase in signal level when properly aligned!

Important thing here is the parabolic shape and metal film (I used foamcore and aluminum foil)

If that doesn't work well, the trench is a lot of work, but will be worth it in the end. Ditch Witch is the only way to go here. Conduit is good. 1500 feet is a long way to go for ethernet, but since you will be using full duplex, there won't be any collisions and you'll be fine.

1. Enable 128 bit WEP with a hand-entered string of characters that are not likely to be guessed. A string of all 1's or some other silliness doesn't cut it. 2. Stop broadcasting the SSID. 3. Enable MAC address filtering. 4. Change your WEP keys from time to time.

Locate your AP at the outside corner of your flat. Attach a pair of reflectors to the antennas, such that radiation will be concentrated only on your flat.

By directing the power over 90 deg instead of 360, what do you think you have just done? Not only have you increased the transmit power, you've also vastly increased the receive gain.

Reflector templates can be found here:

http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template/inde x.html

I was in a situation where I needed broadband in an apartment w/out a connection, and used a DWL AP2000+ in client mode with one of these antennas (styrafoam, a kitchen knife, aluminum foil, and cellotape) to pull a symmetric 3.5mbps from an AP 600 meters down the street.

Make sure to put the reflectors on both antennas and point them both in the same direction. In almost all cases with such APs, only one antenna is transmit, while both receive.

for times when I'd like to use my laptop downstairs (approx. 2 storeys away) the signal strength is always poor with signal dropping out every now and then. With the least amount of cash outlay, I'd like to get more signal into other parts of the igloo.

Well, you could run some cat5 downstairs to another access point, or if you have a Linksys wireless router, you could purchase another AP and set it up to repeat the signal from one floor below (depending on the model). Barring that, you may have some luck with the Linksys high-gain antenna, or even one of these.

Try a patch, corner, or parabolic reflector located at the access point. It should do the job and if it doesn't you will not have wasted much time or money. Freeantennas has plans. You can use ordinary tin foil or screening to You want to orient the antenna to either block the interference or to project it's stronger coverage over your desired area. If that doesn't use a cat5 cable. -- ecks

I have seen two tv shows that tested those cell phone boaster devices. Several devices were tested, all were found to not work. It was found that most of the devices were non conductive. One of the devices that was conductive actually interfered with the signal reduceing range. Beside just conductivity one of the shows went a step furthure and tested if the devices had any affect on radio waves in the cellular bands. All devices tested had no affect and were basically invisible at the frequencies tested.

Both shows asked real professors, at real acredited universities to conduct the tests. One professor had a Ph.D in physics, the other had a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering.

The fact that these cell phone boasters don't work is no surprise. Antenna design, and tunning, is hard. You can't randomly stick a bit of metal next to an antenna and expect the antenna to work better.

These WiFi antennas should work though. As others have posted the antenna apears to be similar to this antenna. This parabolic antenna is simple to build, and it will work. That is because this antenna is a specific shape, and is placed at a specific distance from the typical omni WiFi antennas.

Cost:
Chicken wire $1 (from hardware store)
styrofoam as a base $0 (free from greengrocer)
Cable ties (to hold it together): $1

Gain should be at least 6dB

This is NOT an upgrade for your antenna. This doesn't increase gain, it just takes it from the back and adds to the front. The good thing about this method is it doesn't require you to modify your original antenna, so you don't have to worry about breaking FCC regulations on all equipment being certified. Apart from that, they are selling for $25 something which I created for free out of household items. Check here for more info on how to do it yourself (took me all of 30 minutes the first time).

But again, I want to state this isn't an upgrade, your antenna isn't any more powerful, you're just taking power from the back and shooting it forward, so if you need omnidirectional signal this isn't for you. It can however, increase a dirctional link, but so can a pringles yagi directional, and that's still cheaper than this. Forget about this company and just make your own, it's simple, fun, and cheap, and gives you more of a choice in what material you want to use.

Or you could just go here and make your own with stuff in your house for under $1.