Having good wifi reception is sometimes important if you like having fast internet access - nothing new. But what to do if you want to be sure that you always have the best wifi reception/highest signal quality possible? Best thing is using some kind of antenna. Now my eee PC 1000h of course already has its own two wifi antennas built in, but they are not really helpful in difficult locations where reception is hindered (behind several walls or inside a car for example, basically every place with no direct sight line to the access point), since they are rather small and weak. To improve send/receive performance, some kind of external antenna with a high gain is what is needed.
Most of these antennas have a connector called RP-SMA, so my idea was to build such a connector into my eeePC for attaching high-gain wlan antennas. The right place seemed to be where the kensington lock is located normally. It was removed easily, and after drilling a hole and some filing, I managed to fit said connector into it - actually I also had to remove a triangular shaped piece of my eee's motherboard to create the necessary free space (which was a bit scary to me), but luckily it did not do any harm at all. I bought a pigtail cable with the right connectors for this purpose - RP-SMA male for the antenna side and U.Fl / Hirose for the wifi card side of it. It had a very professional looking shielding and cost me 12 eur.
I just disconnected one of the original antenna cables (the black one) from my wifi card, and replaced it with the pigtail cable. Now I can attach high-gain wifi antennas to my eeePC as needed, and it looks cool too!I use a 2dBi gain antenna most of the time, since it works well and looks good on my 1000h. I salvaged it from an old "siemens" wifi router..
..and guess what, now I still have a stable 11MB/s hundred meters away from my home. Mission accomplished! :)
"goldis good"
antenna stub fits wellMany more useful hardware mods to come, once I manage to write about it and upload the pictures..
stay tuned.
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2 comments:
The triangular piece on your motherboard?
I haven't had a chance to take mine apart yet. Is this something like a notch you had to cut or is it just something in the way that was easily removed?
No notch - just a corner removed (hence triangular piece), to free up the necessary space.
Just take a jigsaw and cut off, there's no traces on the motherboard and no harm is done when removing this piece.
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