Best wifi antennas

[rupes100]

Anyone see or use those high gain antennas to pick up free wifi in and around your area?

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Thanks!

[Terryl]

It depends on where and how far away they are.

You can add an external antenna to some routers and some WIFI cards, but others have fixed or internal antennas.

Yagi's are nice, and good for long range, corner reflectors are another type, parabolic's are also good.

But one thing to remember, the further your antenna is from the router the more signal loss there will be due to the length of the coax.

So to get a good stable link you would need a in-line bi-directional amp, one that will amplify the outgoing signal, and also the incoming signal, as it is a two way street.

You may be able to pick up a signal from a coffe shop, but you might have problems getting back to it.

One thing I have done is to use a USB WIFI stick with an external antenna, then a very short coax is needed, I use a USB to CAT-5 adapter at both ends, with a powered USB hub to run the USB device at the antenna, all this is inside a 3" PVC pipe located at the antenna.

They have USB to CAT5 adapters that will run the USB device at the other end but you run into power problems.

There are 2 watt USB WIFI adapters that work good, I have one setup on a 5 mile path, works fine.