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Cardboard WiFi Antenna Upgrade
An anonymous reader writes "A British company called Tritium is marketing a piece of cardboard with metal foil on one side. You order it for under US$25, shipping included, and you get a flat envelope with the cardboard. Cut it out, shape it into a parabola and snap it into the little stand. Then slip it over your current antenna. It is advertised to extend the range of your current antenna by 2 to 3 times. See their website for more information on the cleverly named Tritium Flatenna."
Is this at all dangerous? Any modification like this is bound to cause signal feedback. Seems like it might work for receiving but I would hesitate to use it to xmit.
Does it work? Yes, this advertises a boost, but so do a bunch of products for cell phones that are purely decorative.
I had to sell these for a small retail store, and to this day I feel guilty. A local newstation did an expose where they found there was zero conductive material at all in these stickers.
You just don't want to eat the stuff. With a half life of about 15 years, tritium will hang around in your body quite a while.
True, tritium has a half life of about 15 years (closer to 12 though.) However, when it comes to ingesting radioactive material, you need to be more concerned with the biological half-life. That is how fast the material will be excreted from you body. For tritium, it is just over 9 days. For tritium to harm you, you have too ingest a pretty large quantity. I know all about the stuff, I injected it into rats for years.
They won't let me buy it online. I don't trust people who won't let me just type my credit card number into a web form.
Seriously, that is funny!
The only thing they are lacking is "Made of recycle cardboard" to get in with the PC (Politically Correct not Personal Computer) crowd.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
Tritium sometimes is dissolved into phosphorscent liquid, which then glows. People used to paint this stuff onto watch arms, etc. Unsuprisingly, most of them died from cancer (they would lick the brush, to make the bristles stick together for a finer stroke), but I'd guess that the phosphors/paint/other chemicals had more to do with that than the tritium.
The other method is to encapsulate tritium in a bead of thin glass, and phosphor coat the outside, then encapsulate that into another piece of glass. I think there is one company doing this (they have a patent on it). They use it in Navy SEAL dive watches, compasses, and gun sights. But I'd guess that the patent has expired. I have a military compass sitting right next to me dated 15 DEC 1981 (patents of that sort last 20 years, so it's done for), with the tritiium beads. Even has a warning on the back saying it contains 190 milicuries of radioactive hydrogen 3.
One thing is for sure, it used to glow about twice as bright. (~14 year halflife IIRC).
You're probably in the minority if you don't have a semi-parabolic pan or pot lid lying around your kitchen (though, this is Slashdot, maybe you're not in the minority here). That's what I used for to focus the signal at my last place. Just used a pack of CDs to prop it up behind the antenna. It was a fairly signficant boost. I was impressed. And it didn't cost me anything I hadn't already paid.
Remove top and bottom, cut down side to get rectangle with nice built-in curl. Then fashion cardboard braces ala www.freeantennas.com and tape to antenna. Soft drink cans work too; plastic coating doesn't seem to degrade performance.
I built one based on this http://www.freeantennas.com/projects/template2/ind ex.html and it increased coverage in the back of my house by %26 according to the Cisco Aironet Desktop Utility when connected to my Qwe(r)st issued all in one Actiontec DSL TA/802.11G AP/Router. Given, it is not "increasing gain" just making it directional, but for 20 minutes work and no cost it was worth it.
.-=Wit is educated insolence=-. -Aristotle