I tried OVERPOWERING my WiFi!

So here it is. My last big video for 2023. I hope you enjoyed the show this year😁 Like always I will do a small recap of 2023 regarding my videos, projects, release schedule and everything else involved. I also love to answer some of your questions. So feel free to comment here and maybe I will answer your question in the video😉See you soon

Another option would be to move that new Wireless access point. Being against that wall and having it surrounded by conduit and furniture will affect its range too.

The way you had your router hanging on the wall, the built-in 1/4 wave antenna was placed horizontally and it was directing its RF energy into the attic and cellar rather than into the room. Just mounting the router in a horizontal position (rather than hanging it on the wall) would provide you with better coverage.

The actual improvement you are seeing is because you rotated the antenna 90 degrees. As you pointed out in your sketches an antenna radiates the signal to the side and not out of the top. Before you were basically relying on catching reflections while with the new antennas you are receiving the signal. And wherever possible you should make sure that the receiving antenna is parallel to your sender (for instance with WiFi sticks)

The first antenna (the supposed quarter eave half dipole) is not used for wiifi. Its the DECT antenna for the dect base station functionality of the router. You can see its next to the dialog sc14445 IC which is a fully inegrated DECT transciever.

Watch out when you unplug the antenna when the router is operational: The built-in amplifier can be overloaded and die when the (normally 50ohm) load/impedance go to infinity. Especially true for internal antennas that are not expected to be removed

I built one of those "Russian" Wi-Fi beam antennas when I moved into a temporary apartment about a 1/4 mile from my in-law's house. My intention was to tap off their Wi-Fi network for internet services so I didn't have to pay an ISP to run fiber up to an apartment that I was going to leave in for a few months. It was about twice as long as the one in the video and made of sheet metal that I had cut out of an empty unused paint can. I then taped it on the end of a laundry pole and positioned it as high above my top floor balcony as I could. It worked well enough to read their SSID but not well enough for my laptop to connect to it. I think my laundry pole wasn't long enough to get the antenna over my building's roof ridge and that got in the way of the line-of-sight signal. But I proved that the concept was sound. It used to be fun to roam the streets with such an antenna looking for Wi-Fi stations that people didn't bother to lock, but today's routers pretty much now all come with WPA2 already configured.

Building antennas without an analyzer, especially at these frequencies can be difficult. Another thing you can try is to move the antennas to a better position with some good coax cable.

Having a better antenna might also get you into trouble. The maximum legal power is not the power out of the amplifier, but the EIRP. The EIRP takes into account the gain of the antenna (how much better it is) in addition to the power. For instance if you have a power of 10 mW and an antenna gain of 10, then your EIRP is 100 mW (the maximum for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi). So increasing the gain of your antenna without reducing your transmitted power should still be illegal. It's actually logical, otherwise you could use a giant dish as Wi-Fi antenna and potentially jam any device in its aperture.

Best Solution: PoE-Powered Access-Points. Just place them where you need them (eg. where you have the most clients). Nice bonus being that when a new Standard comes out (like 6E) you can just move the old AP's to other rooms and move the new AP's in their place.

dammit i thought the title said "I tried OVERPOWERING my Wife!" :D

Best solution (but a little inconvenient at first) is to move the wifi router to the centre of your home, perhaps in the ceiling cavity. Your devices will never be more than half the diagonal distance to a corner away from the router.

I was expecting you to also put a reflector behind the antenna. Great video, nice explanation!

For the last antenna, it would be cool to see its S11 measurements from a VNA. This would help see what the resonant frequencies are to confirm it was tuned just right. Use anything from a inexpensive LiteVNA64 to Rhodhe & Schwarz equipment.

9:52 Yagi-Uda antenna driven element(driven element usually is just a dipole antenna) needs to be insulated from the rest of the elements. Try building antenna from 2mm metal rods attached to 10mm PVC pipe with hot glue. Also, yagi antennas have very high directivity and are narrowband try checking signal strenght with 0, 1, 2 and 3 directors with antennas elements both being verically and horizontally and with using different channels.

Instead of additional routers or repeaters, you want to separate the router and access point functionality. You can place access points where you need them, while the router does packet routing, and can be placed anywhere. Several companies offer equipment like this; I use Ubiquiti. I have a lot of IoT (really LAN of Things); 150 devices on WiFi. One router (Edgerouter 6P), and 4 access points (UAP-AC-M) keeps everything humming along.

Best is to use multiple WiFi access points throughout the house. Then use the isp as a modem/router. I have 5 WAP in my house. Two outside, one middle of basement and two at opposite ends of the house in the corner with reflectors.

10:42 these antennas work, but they are very sensitive to assembly, inaccuracies greatly affect their operation. Antennas of this type were even used on the Soviet lunar rover

There are not only limits to maximum transmit power, but also Effective radiated power, so you are also not allowed to simply hook up a directional antenna as that might raise your EIRP in that direction too high. Whilst using different antennas might feel good, afaik you might just kill your MIMO capabilities, crippling your speeds even though your signal strength is better because the communication falls back to less channels. And of course you can move the router to a better location with less things in the way like a more central location and an orientation which matches the antennas radiation pattern (though that is typically already good) These consumer routers are a good all-in-one-package housing the modem (to translate fibre to electrical), the access-point (the wifi-module) and internal services (routing, dns, ..) in a neat package, but this might not be desirable in all cases. You could place the modem (like your current router) where your fibre comes into the house and then run ethernet to a separate access-point in a more central location, or even have multiple access-points for better coverage. Without running wires, you can use mesh-APs, though they usually cost quite a bit more and are prone to interference and wireless limitations themselves (but usually work quite well in typical setups)

Its always a joy seeing your uploads on Sundays! Stay Creative! -From Texas