Linksys WAP54G
Most wireless experts will tell you that the antenna is the weak point on a factory default wireless setup. They're certainly right, the factory antennas must be lame because one of the available accessories for the WAP54G is a better set of antennas. That's somewhat of an insult, isn't it? Sell you an access point and then try and sell you some better antennas for it. No way I'm going for that, I decided to whip up my own.
Relevant Links
I have wired connections in most rooms of my house so the first thing I did was move the access point to the ground floor level, basically the 2nd level of the house. I wanted to have it on the opposite end of the house and at least one level up from where I would be doing my testing before I started on the antenna. I started monitoring signal strength using NetStumbler while I built my first homebrew antenna.
Inside the WAP54G
If you're wondering what the access point looks like inside, it's basically a PCB (printed circuit board) with some chips on it. The usual
thing. To get more specific take a look at the pictures:
Top side of the PCB
Bottom side of the PCB
To get started building your own wireless antenna, simply put wireless antenna design into Google and you'll get an incredible number of results. Unfortunately, many of the pages are outdated, misinformed, contain bad math, or are just plain useless. A better source of information is the ARRL Antenna Book which is available through many libraries or on Amazon. It's a standard reference source on antenna building of all types. If you want to build a decent antenna, you're going to need access to that book - there is just too much misinformation on the web to do a decent job of it.
My first parabolic reflector was, predictably, ugly. Since it was a quickie experiment just to see if it would have any effect at
all, I was less concerned with the appearance and more concerned with the performance.
Using some card stock, glue and aluminum foil, I was able to get around a 9dbm jump in signal gain. In case you're not familiar with wireless signals, that's a significant jump in performance. The increase was from the parabolic effect of the contraption you see in the picture. The problem with it is that the effect is very directional. That's ok when you're trying to get from one link to another, but when you are just trying to get a better signal throughout a building you want a more omnidirectional type of antenna.