[NBLUG/talk] Trying to pick up a WiFi signal

[Bob Blick]

Hi Zack!

I worked for over a year in a situation where the wifi was 125 ft away
with two walls(mine and theirs). I had some control over the antenna on
the access point - as long as it was a dipole. I tried four types of
antennas on my end, a standard dipole, a high gain dipole, a cantenna,
and a log-periodic(yagi) from HSC. On the high-gain dipole I tried it by
itself and also after adding a parabolic cardboard+foil reflector. The
log-periodic probably would have worked really well if there had been
one on the other end. The high-gain dipole with reflector worked best,
except when there was a microwave oven in operation. Not just the oven
under my control. The cantenna gave the best performance when microwaves
were in use. But I still had downtime almost every hour. Bitrate when it
was working varied dramatically. This was all 2.4GHz. I had better
uptime with 802.11b than the faster alternative. The final approach used
the hi-gain dipole with reflector on the access point, and the cantenna
on the client side.

I tried a USB adapter attached to asian cookware and that seemed to work
well, but the USB approach didn't match my needs. I expect it would also
have suffered from regular downtime just like all the other tested
approaches.

My sympathies and best of luck.

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015, at 05:47 PM, Zack Gold wrote:
> Hello NBLUGers,
> 
> My university doesn't provide WiFi or Ethernet access to my apartment.
> They expect us to pay Time Warner Cable for Cable Internet, then they
> reimburse us for the semester, which equates to about 5 Mbps.
> 
> I am not very far from campus -- about 200 feet from the nearest hotspot.
> Would it be possible to pick up the signal using an antenna?  It would
> have
> to: a) be undetectable (I don't want ITS knocking on my door), b) fast (I
> want to beat 5 Mbps), and, most importantly, c) resistant to freezing
> cold
> environments (the weather in Rochester is AWFUL -- I'm moving to
> California
> when I graduate).
> 
> Please advise, and thank you.
> Zack

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