This Christmas I spent some time with my in-laws in Ireland. It was the standard Christmas chain of events, sit down on the sofa, turn on the TV, eat and drink. This went well for twenty minutes or so until the urge came over me to turn on the laptop (I was quite impressed I'd lasted so long). I couldn't see the wireless network from the front room - the most comfortable room in the house and no wireless to be found.
Unhappy with my lack of wireless I decided to do some research online (in a cold bedroom closer to the router). Pretty quickly it became apparent that there may be a solution to my problems. Most routers transmit signals equally in all directions through an omnidirectional antenna. This makes sense for most home use scenarios, it eases setup problems as the router can be placed anywhere in the house and will transmit equally over a specific range. After reading a bit more I found that an omnidirectional antenna can be replaced with a directional antenna. By using a directional antenna a greater range can be achieved in a particular direction. This sounded perfect for this situation as the router was located on one side of the house and only needed to point in one direction. This discovery became even more interesting when I found you could download a template and make your own!
After searching through a few template recommendations it seemed the most popular was the Ez-12 Parabolic Reflector from FreeAntennas.com. All that's required to make the antenna was: kitchen foil, scissors, card and glue. So in true Blue Peter style I followed the instructions and here's my masterpiece:
It's probably not worth a Blue Peter badge, but it improved the signal enough to use the Internet in a previously out of range area of the house. The signal improved from zero bars to one bar, so not a massive improvement but not bad for virtually nothing!