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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."
And you thought tin-foil was just for hats!
That's an awfully bad company name to associate with antennas, considering some people are nervous about them to begin with.
Or you could just go here and make your own with stuff in your house for under $1.
doesn't it?
Microwave pizzas, hot pockets, etc come with foil-backed cardboard underneath. That looks to be the same material -- I'd wager you could cobble something together with those as well. And you'd have something to eat while you're geeking out.
These would probably put you over the legal limit, if you get more than ~5dBi out of them, which you should. Most cheap consumer gear is 15dBm, so 15+5=20dBm=100mW
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
just turn it inside out, insert over antenna, viola 10 mpbs and encrypted ...
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.
I'll offer the same thing for $22.50! Shipping included! and um, I'll throw in a free yahoo e-mail account to boot!
Beat that!
I tried this once. People called it "fraud", though... they were so disappointed when they saw the Staples price sticker still on the cardboard and tin-foil.
:)
Just goes to show you, those British folk can get away with anything!
Anyways... back to planning my quest for world dominaton using nothing more than a stick of gum and a paperclip.
Damn that summary...
Cut it out, shape it into a parabola and snap it into the little stand. Then slip it over your
ARGGHHH, but I really have the urge to say 'HEAD'.
Damn you tinfoil hat posters, damn you to hell and back damn blast and double damn.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
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.
Looks like their webserver is made of cardboard too...
That was fast. Less than 5 posts and the machine is melted.
9 7.php
w w.tritium.co.uk/
Well here's a press release on the product. I like the part about it "vaguely resembling a Klingon space ship".
Check it here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/6/prwebxml1350
Oh and of course the Google cache of the melted tritium.co.uk box: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:TSbW7tvLA14J:w
You can get Wi Fi Speed Spray for a few bucks less, and there's no overseas shipping to worry about.
It looks to me as if 15 minutes with graph paper, scissors and glue (together with a bit of card stock and foil) would give you the same thing, without waiting on the snailmail, and without the $25 U.S.
By the way, the site I link to says 9.99 pounds, which should be a bit less than $25.
See what I've been reading.
i laughed at this too, like 90% of slashdotters here
then again, if you told me in the 1980s that people would pay for bottled water
or in the 1990s that people would pay $5.00 for a cup of coffee
i would have laughed at you too
the lesson is not to laugh, but to figure out your own amazing scheme
for while we laugh at the people who sell this stuff, they are laughing all the way to the bank
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Good idea Getting an ad for your product posted to Slashdot. Bad idea Hosting the site on DSL in your mom's basement.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
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.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Unfortunately all this does is crank up the gain. It probably works fantastic with one story houses, but I imagine for two story apartments and houses it wouldn't be too ideal. Crank up the gain, your antenna becomes more and more dipole- it broadcasts very well onto one plane but not anywhere else with a strong signal.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
For $24 I'll sell you a cardboard box that you can sleep in. Just think how much money you'll save by not paying for housing! This is ideal for people living in Silicon Valley.
Mathematics is not a crime.
The distribution of magnetic waves is His business and thou who tampers with it art deeply sin. Instead of getting thee Ethernet frames in the coffee below, they (the frames) can end-up at the neighbour above.
Once you've got a few dB's of gain, why not use the leftover cardboard from your pizza box and heat up some more pizza?
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Also known as chlorine?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
It's the only way to fly. Pringles can antennas just plain don't work - the only reason you see an improvement is because *anything* even vaguely right is better than the piss-poor excuse for an antenna that wifi cards have.
Or phosphor coat it for that matter? Tritium is a Hydrogen isotope.
You can disolve tritium in a phospor liquid. Tritium is usually used in compounds or molecules that have been 'tritiated'. Like tritiated water, tritiated thymidine, etc.
Set the kind of post to "HTML Formatted", using the little menu in the lower right. Then wrap HTML markup around it:
<a href="http://www.foo.com/"> Text that you want highlighted </a>
Fractenna is actually a pretty interesting-looking link. Thanks.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
I think the stuff reflects the microwaves back through the food, to effectively double the cooking speed.
No, the previous poster had it right.
Your basic microwave heats the food where there's water or resistive material (like carbon). So it tends to make crispy materia soggy (by "steaming" it with the water evaporated from the wet places). And if you heat it long enough to dry it out, some spots heat enough to become burned - at which point they absorb more microwaves and become MORE burned - in a positive feedback that makes spotty burns rather than a crispy crust.
The material is very thinly coated with metal and quite resistive. So it absorbs a portion of the microwaves and becomes very hot. The infrared is used to crisp the surface of the material, like a broiler would.
Getting the packaging balanced - so the food is thawed, frozen, and crisped properly in the oven - takes some work. (Resistive cookware is available for do-it-yourselfers who want to broil in a microwave oven.)
Such resistive packaging would make a rotten reflector. It's more like a "stealth" coating on an aircraft than a microwave mirror. (It might be useful, though, to make a microwave absorbing wall between your antenna and a nearby interference source.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Or you could just buy a Cantenna. It's based on the pringles-can antenna, but it's bigger, better, weather-proofed, and takes a lot of the hassle out of making an antenna out of a pringles can. Not to mention the fact it's better.
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.
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
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