Speaker 1: Put away your tinfoil hats and grab your aluminum foil
Speaker 1: WiFi antennas. It's time to talk about how to boost
Speaker 1: your wireless internet signal. I'm jovin Strickland and this is
Speaker 1: tech stuff Daily. It sounds a bit like an urban
Speaker 1: myth you can boost your WiFi signal reach with a
Speaker 1: little aluminum foil shaped a particular way. But as it
Speaker 1: turns out, the science holds up. What's next? Are we
Speaker 1: going to find out that blowing into an old Nintendo
Speaker 1: cartridge really does make it work better? Side note, don't
Speaker 1: blow into cartridges. You're more likely to gum things up
Speaker 1: to make them better. All right, back to the WiFi.
Speaker 1: The research is out of Dartmouth University. She has jal And,
Speaker 1: assistant professor, spoke about the project. She said that all
Speaker 1: it takes is about thirty five dollars worth of materials
Speaker 1: to create a reflector capable of shaping WiFi signals. There's
Speaker 1: no need for repeaters or signal boosters. You can do
Speaker 1: it all yourself booming you have access to a three
Speaker 1: D printer. That is. The research team took an interesting
Speaker 1: approach to their work. They took inspiration from d I.
Speaker 1: Y communities that had experimented with using aluminum cans to
Speaker 1: direct WiFi signals. Essentially, these groups had cut cans open
Speaker 1: to turn them into sheets of thin aluminum, and then
Speaker 1: attached those sheets to a router's antenna. The sheets would
Speaker 1: block signals going out in that direction and redirect them
Speaker 1: in the opposing direction. It worked, but it wasn't very precise.
Speaker 1: The team thought they could dial this in a bit.
Speaker 1: They developed software that does all the number crunching for you.
Speaker 1: In order to make a design that will suit your needs,
Speaker 1: you plug in some parameters into the software, giving it
Speaker 1: information about the size and shape of the room that
Speaker 1: the router is in. Maybe you want to boost the
Speaker 1: signal in one direction and curtail it in another. For example,
Speaker 1: you might want your wireless router located near a window,
Speaker 1: and you'd rather not broadcast your WiFi signal out to
Speaker 1: your entire neighborhood. By reshaping that signal, you can direct
Speaker 1: it where you want. This isn't just efficient, it's potentially
Speaker 1: more secure. WiFi sniffers will have a harder time connecting
Speaker 1: to your routers signal if that signal is being redirected
Speaker 1: inside your home rather than outside. Once the software has
Speaker 1: done all its beat boop boop calculations, it designs a
Speaker 1: three dimensional shape calibrated precisely to the information you've fed
Speaker 1: the software. That includes taking into account the directions where
Speaker 1: you want a stronger signal and the ones where you'd
Speaker 1: like to prevent the signal from bleeding over into other regions,
Speaker 1: such as the street outside your house. The three D
Speaker 1: shape acts like a reflector. It's sort of like the
Speaker 1: bowl on a satellite dish. After getting the design for
Speaker 1: the shape, you have to then make the darn thing.
Speaker 1: This is most easily done with a three D printer.
Speaker 1: Three D printers are a type of additive manufacturing, meaning
Speaker 1: they create shapes by adding to a foundation layer by layer. Typically,
Speaker 1: a printer does this by laying down a sticky layer
Speaker 1: of plastic material on a heated platform. The plastic adheres
Speaker 1: to the platform enough to stay in place as the
Speaker 1: printer lays down another thin layer, and another and another.
Speaker 1: This happens over and over until the collection of layers
Speaker 1: reaches the dimensions of the object you set to print.
Speaker 1: Smaller objects tend to be easier to print than larger ones,
Speaker 1: mostly because you don't have to worry about the structural
Speaker 1: integrity of the object quite as much. There are three
Speaker 1: D printers that can build objects out of stuff other
Speaker 1: than plastic, but generally speaking you're less likely to run
Speaker 1: into those in the consumer market. If you've got the time, money,
Speaker 1: and as we found out in our office, the patients
Speaker 1: to work with a three D printer, you can purchase
Speaker 1: one for yourself and start churning out the chatch keys. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: you can do a quick search online to see if
Speaker 1: there are any three D printing businesses that can take
Speaker 1: on custom jobs. Once printed, you then cote the three
Speaker 1: D object in aluminum foil. This gives the object it's
Speaker 1: reflective properties. The shape determines where the signal will go
Speaker 1: once it bounces off the object. The combination of those
Speaker 1: two is what allows you to reshape WiFi signals. The
Speaker 1: aluminum foil and shape aren't actually boosting the signal in
Speaker 1: any way. That is, they're not making a weak signals strong.
Speaker 1: They do redirect the signal so that it might more
Speaker 1: efficiently reach the areas within a space you designate, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't make your WiFi magically better. Keep in mind
Speaker 1: that WiFi is ultimately radio waves. The frequencies for WiFi
Speaker 1: are in the two point four and five giga hurts
Speaker 1: ranges in the United States. So why those ranges? Well,
Speaker 1: there are a couple of reasons. The big one is
Speaker 1: that the radio frequency spectrum is really valuable real estate.
Speaker 1: If you were to broadcast two different things along the
Speaker 1: same frequency, like TV signals and WiFi, let's say you
Speaker 1: didn't counter interference. That's not good whether you want to
Speaker 1: log into the world of warcraft or watch your stories.
Speaker 1: So you have to set aside blocks of frequencies for
Speaker 1: specific uses. That way, you can be reasonably sure that
Speaker 1: one technology won't meddle with another. The Dartmouth team has
Speaker 1: yet to release a build of the software they used
Speaker 1: to design the three D shapes. Without that software, you're
Speaker 1: not likely to create a reflector that's going to be
Speaker 1: very useful. You might even make your signal more difficult
Speaker 1: to connect to. Hopefully the team will either create a
Speaker 1: software product people can purchase, or even release their program
Speaker 1: for free so that anyone can take advantage of their research.
Speaker 1: To learn more about the Internet, WiFi, radio frequencies, and
Speaker 1: weird experiments in technology, subscribe to the tech Stuff podcast.
Speaker 1: Episodes last about an hour and explore all things tech.
Speaker 1: I'll see you again soon.