The cheap way to improve your Wi-Fi performance

MyBroadband tested a few low budget DIY options to improve your Wi-Fi reception, and one of the cheapest options — simply adding a reflector — produced the best results.

If you want to improve the reception and range of your Wi-Fi service, you have a few options:

• Upgrade your network with better or more access points, which is difficult and expensive.
• Add range extenders and repeaters, which can cost a pretty penny.
• Replace the antennas on adapters and access points, which is only possible in some situations.

We decided to go the cheap route to see how a few widely punted do-it-yourself options perform.

These options include using antennas people may have at home, or that can be built at home with widely available and affordable equipment.

Antennas tested

We used an inexpensive Wi-Fi N adapter with a removable external antenna to test the performance of each intervention. This adapter is available from electronics stores for around R100.

We tested eight different antenna configurations:

• The included antenna
• The included antenna with Windsurfer reflector
• A Wi-Fi antenna from an old TP-Link Router
• TP-Link Wi-Fi antenna with Windsurfer Reflector
• A 2.4GHz antenna from an RC radio
• DIY halfwave Dipole
• DIY 5 Element Yagi with halfwave Dipole
• DIY Moxon rectangle antenna

We built the DIY antennas using online guides and calculators. We used copper wire extracted from an old power cable and SMA connectors bought from an electronics store.

Building these antennas required digital callipers for measuring and a soldering iron for some connections.

The antennas were not tested or tuned on professional equipment, as the average person would not have a vector network analyser at home.

The Windsurfer reflector is easy to build. The design is printed on thin cardboard, cut out, covered in foil, and assembled.

Windsurfer components

It was time to put these antennas to the test.

We connected to three different Wi-Fi networks in our office for these tests. The tests were conducted inside the building and outside in the parking lot — about 80 meters from the access points.

Inside the office, the antennas had a similar performance. When we went outside, however, the difference became apparent.

The TP-Link router antenna with the reflector stole the show with the best performance.

Without the reflector, the link speeds reported by Windows dropped slightly, and the weakest network was no longer visible.

Another setup that performed well was the basic antenna with a Windsurfer reflector. While it could only connect to the strongest network, it was still a significant improvement compared to not having the Windsurfer reflector.

The rest of the antennas yielded similar performances, most likely because they were not tuned at the frequency being used.

If your router or adapter supports an external antenna, using one from another router may provide a significant improvement in signal strength and range.

With minimal effort, you can build and add a simple reflector which will add a big performance improvement.

The table below provides an overview of the performance of the different configurations.

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