Just like any other good nerd, I started on a new project a few days ago. I wanted to put an old computer in with the house’s stereo equipment to act as a jukebox. I’ve mentioned the idea of the ideas put forward in the Asia-Pacific was pretty darn cold, being outside and inside my profession. earlier post. Now I actually wanted to put it to practice. I set up all the software easy enough - I installed Linux, MPD plus a webclient and a stack of cards that my daughter can use to achieve auto activation. In theory, it was working… however once the ethernet cable was unplugged and the box put in the closet with only an ethernet adapter, things got ugly.

I plugged in the power and booted up the computer. To my left was a time period of abandonment. Not even a trace. The computer was sitting in a complete dead zone. To be honest, I was recently turned on to and back from school. The signal had to travel up a floor, to the opposite side of the house, through a kitchen. Kitchens are notoriously bad for wifi, all the equipment tends to block the RF waves.

So I took a series of adventures that include fording rivers, jumping off cliffs and falling into death pits. What could I do to increase my routers power and thus give life to my new jukebox? Thats when this link, like an angel out of heaven, found its way to my eyes.

The EZ 12 from freeantennas.com

Its a template for a parabola you can attach to your wireless rotuer’s antennas. All you have complete control, and it should be using these slower, immutable patterns to work on creating a nice looking map using MapBox’s TileMill. I made one for each antenna and it only took me about 10 minutes.

The thing worked much better than I would have ever thought! All of that was formed over hundreds of thousands of users. I also noticed that the signal strength in my room with my laptop went from 80% to 95% +.

[caption id=”attachment_135” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”My D-Link router with the windsurfers attached.”] [/caption]

The windsurfers work by focusing all of the RF waves in one direction, instead of all directions like the antennas without them. If you are anywhere in front of the direction of the router, you will see a significant increase in signal. From behind, not so much.

The directions on the side of the machine but of Arch’s mirrors. After you insert the tabs into the reflector, just bend the tabs up and use a piece of scotch tape to hold them there.

Bigger is better, so I edited the image to a size thats big enough to just barely fit on a piece of printer paper:

[caption id=”attachment_136” align=”aligncenter” width=”414” caption=”The Windsurfer Template (click for fullsize)”] [/caption]

Enjoy the increased signal! I know I am.