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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!
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.
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.
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.
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 have some tritium keychains and some watches with tritium in them. The mesuarable dosage that you get from it is nominal compared to background radiation. IE the difference in background radiation exposure between someone living in the mountains and someone living at sea level is greater than the difference in exposure carrying a small amount of tritium with a phosphor coating. 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.
The main difference here is that there have been many studies on radiation exposure over both short term and long term durations. There have been far fewer studies on the effects of high frequency, low energy RF. When you consider what high frequency, high energy RF and even low frequency high energy RF can do to the human body, it sure makes you wonder if this stuff is safe anyway.
People this paranoid, however, are definately the target market for this kind of antenna.
To me, the whole thing reeks a little on the surface of ads proclaiming something 'it's like attaching a four foot antenna to your cell phone!, though the obvious benefit here is that it's an antenna tuned to a specific frequency designed to make an omnidirectional antenna a little more directional. Still when you can make it for about $1 using a ruler, some foil, and some scissors you have to wonder why they are even bothering.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but their website had a halflife of only about 15 minutes. The irony...
I can't decide which kind of rat's eyes are creepier: original blood red reflective glow or new cool green self-illuminated glow.
Yes, tritium is a very low power beta emitter. I occasionally work with the stuff, for detecting various biological macromolecules. It takes weeks for the stuff to make an image on photographic film, that's in direct contact with the gel, and soaked in fluorographic enhancer. Our required dosimeters can't even detect the stuff, nor can a geiger counter. We still do periodic wipes and scintillation count them though. It's emissions wont get through your skin. Really the only risk is if you quaff a flask of the stuff.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Also known as chlorine?
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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.
This is right and wrong. Ever wondered how an antenna works? Take a look at an yagi antenne: Just metal and some wires. Do you believe this includes some secret powered power amp?
What this Cardboard does is the same as every antenne with gain does: It focus the beam into a specific direction, which will "amplify" the effective radiated power in this direction. And effective radiated power (EIRP) happens to be, whats regulated.
So this cardboard is bound to the same regulations as any directional antenna.
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.
Anyone can grow their own tomatoes, or search for gold or gemstones, but how many choose instead to buy tomatoes, gold, or gems? Often tomatoes in the grocery taste like wet cardboard and sell for $3.99/pound, which is why I grow my own when I can. But I also search for gold and gemstone deposits. Some are DIY'ers; most are not.
-cp-
Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets
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