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I amplified my home's Wi-Fi with aluminum foil

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Re: I amplified my home's Wi-Fi with aluminum foil

#5
post #2

Put 'em just behind the antenna like a dish aimed toward where you want to bend the signal to. It's not great, but it's cheap and easy.

I am using my neighbors WiFi, which I can only catch in my balcony. He stays above me, but diagonally opposite, so the source is quite away. Any way I can amplify the WiFi strength? So I need the source to be around in order to amplify?

Re: I amplified my home's Wi-Fi with aluminum foil

#6

I am using my neighbors WiFi, which I can only catch in my balcony. He stays above me, but diagonally opposite, so the source is quite away. Any way I can amplify the WiFi strength? So I need the source to be around in order to amplify?

I think the source needs to be strong. I'm currently using a wifi extender and noticed the speed isn't good when I move the extender to a room further from the source.

Re: I amplified my home's Wi-Fi with aluminum foil

#7

I am using my neighbors WiFi, which I can only catch in my balcony. He stays above me, but diagonally opposite, so the source is quite away. Any way I can amplify the WiFi strength? So I need the source to be around in order to amplify?

Lookup cantenna which was popular back in the day for catching WiFi from further away spots.

Re: I amplified my home's Wi-Fi with aluminum foil

#8
I was thinking of doing something similar a few days ago but came to the conclusion — perhaps wrongly — that the inevitable creases in a DIY aluminium foil sheet would render it ineffective as a dish, due to the scatter created.

Anyone more knowledgeable able to chime-in on the effect of creases here? I couldn’t find any mention of it in the article...

Re: I amplified my home's Wi-Fi with aluminum foil

#9
Did that a while ago, when the trees have leaves, I hardly receive WiFi in my shed. So I put a aluminum foil when I went to the back around the router.

It worked, but other directions are difficult. I also had success by changing the channel with less interference in my router settings.

Re: I amplified my home's Wi-Fi with aluminum foil

#10

I am using my neighbors WiFi, which I can only catch in my balcony. He stays above me, but diagonally opposite, so the source is quite away. Any way I can amplify the WiFi strength? So I need the source to be around in order to amplify?

Why not consider putting a good extender placed near your balcony?

I use one at my Dad's house (next door to mine) so that I can access my wifi. Our houses are brick, and in spite of that, the extender I got does a pretty good job. I've tried various extenders in the past few years, and they were all pretty flaky, but the latest generation of extenders seems to perform much better than older ones.

I'm using the Wirecutter's current favorite, the TP-Link RE450. Having said that, the RE450 was recently found to be spamming NTP servers with an excessive amount of requests.

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