Points for originality (sorta) but I don't like his antennas. I think he mixed too many designs in implementation. Also, I doubt that a 75-ohm VGA connector pair is the best match for RF at 50-ohm and 2.4GHz... VGA may see 500KHz for a single pair, but I doubt in excess of 5MHz tops. I'll have to look at the specs for HD15 and RS232 and see what the connectors can take. There's a reason the 13W3 uses three coax cables...

On the plus side, you can get a .5W amp from Hong Kong that does a/b/g :)

Amplifying your laptop Wi-Fi

I have always been frustrated with the performance of my laptop Wi-Fi. I tried many solutions to improve the signal from far away routers, but few of these worked. I'll cover a solution that I came up with that finally did yield some results for me.

Most laptops nowadays have a mini PCI Wi-Fi card hooked to an antenna which is located inside a screen plastic cover on the laptop. I was browsing eBay recently and noticed that there were some Wi-Fi amplifiers available that promoted themselves as improving the reception of the signal. Sadly most of those amplifiers are designed to be hooked to a PCMCIA type card or a router! None of them seemed to be specifically made for a mini PCI card.

I decided to buy a Wi-Fi amplifier and hook it to my laptop. I have an ASUS A2H laptop with a Dell 1470 a/b/g Wi-Fi mini PCI card inside, I bought the card for $20 off of eBay. I bought the amplifier for $118, it is a 500 mw bi-directional amplifier called "turbo tenna", the amplifier was shipped from Hong Kong and I received it shortly after ordering on eBay.

Fun.