Cake pantenna is marginally useful
From the most helpful suggestions in the "Help me get WiFi over 280 feet, through brick walls and the wandering meat of office workers" post, I selected the single cheapest and lowest-effort suggestion, from tp1024. Pictured here for your amusement is the resulting Cake Pantenna.
It is a cake pan scotch taped to a box, upon which rests the router. This results in a very discernible improvement: iStumbler reports a marginal increase in signal strenght, from about 25 to 30 percent, and a marked reduction in noise, from about 20 percent to about 10 percent. The connection is now actually usable, though still a giant pain in the ass to much done with.
It does at least tell me that a more, um, robust solution in the same vein will likely do the trick.
Looking again at the photo, I am struck by something—could the metal gauze of the bug screen, just outside the window, be the silent killer here?
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Worst case scenario: You have no signal until that pie is finished.
I'd put on some coffee. :)
Joel suggesting coating it in PAM.
If you calculate the wavelength of light being transmit by the router/dish, and it's smaller than the size of the holes in the screen mesh, I'd think interference would be minimal (although I suppose that, like a single-slit experiment, you might be diffracting the light in all sorts of directions).
That being said, and easy experiment would be to remove the screen and check signal strength.
You could also try other pans (pie, deeper cake, maybe a bundt) and alternate router heights to make a more optimal microwave dish/feedhorn combo.
This is almost exactly the way it was in my dorm. :) I laughed about it all day when I had it set up there, since it resolved a lot of headache we had with it in the most ridiculously simple way imaginable.
Kattw:
WLAN uses frequencies of about 2 GHz - microwaves. Those have wavelengths roughly on the order of an inch.
There was a pantenna in last weeks episode of 'My Name is Earl'... although in that case it was a television antenna covered in panties.
Have you tried adjusting the speed to a lower setting? say somewhere around 20mb or even 11mb? I am not sure if an airport will allow that. I have used this trick in the past to eek out a better signal distance with 54mb routers.
Take the bug screen out of the window too, couldnt hurt.
The bug screen is probably not helping -- I have the same issue here. If I put the antenna outside the window, BAM, works great. Inside? Not so great. The bug screen acts as a block.
I would be very interested in hearing the results of removing the Faraday cage that is the bug screen.
I say this without doing any fact checking; I'm just relying on my error-prone head-meat: Aren't most window screens nylon nowadays? I wouldn't think nylon would act as an rf inhibitor.
Is the pan catching waves from another internet source and focusing them onto the base station, which is acting as a signal repeater?
Or is the pan focusing waves from the base station and directing the internet connection to another location?
In an RF noisy environment (such as your own), the improvements by filtering out the noise are more important than boosting the signal itself. What you are after is an improved Signal to Noise ratio. If you extend the sheilding around the router (above + below) you should get even more improvement.
Not to be nitpicky, but this is the internet and all, but it's a pie pantenna. A cake pantenna would have edges perpendicular to the base of the pan, not angled.
Unfortunately, I buy all of my cookware from the "pans that look like castles" section of the williams sonoma store, so I have to stick to tin foiling my walls. I call it my crazy-towntenna.
WURP is correct - most of these screens aren't metal anymore - nylon/poly/whatever is cheaper, easier to work with, and equally effective against bugs. If yours seems to be metal, you can get the supplies to replace it with nylon for only a little bit more $ than the pie pan and it's ridiculously easy.
Yeah, removing the screen didn't seem to make a difference. I'm pretty sure it's nylon from the weight and feel, but it's actually hard to tell because it's painted black.
I had to turn in my geek card on this one, I'm afraid. I'd have liked to get busy making a superior cantenna arrangement, but needs must as the devil may. So I ordered a unidirectional from MacWireless.com.
The answer may lie within your own web site:
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/04/15/the-wifi-predator.html