[Steven] managed to get his hands on a Panasonic CF-R1 for pretty cheap. Though it is a decently powerful machine, it was built in 2002 and didn’t come with an internal wireless card. It did, however have a mini-PCI slot. [Steven] promptly installed a wireless card, but found the internal antenna lacking. The solution was to custom mount an external antenna. Mounting it was fairly easy, he removed the phone jack and epoxied the connector in its place. The reception was greatly improved. He says he went from seeing 6 access points to 31 as soon as he installed it. Similar things have been done to the Eee PC 900.
Wow. From 6 to 31 access points? He must be in a city.
this is so incredibly relevant and useful. I will now pee myself.
sarcasm meters around the world explode…
i think this is quite an awesome plan!
(especially for borrowing college internet…)
cool good job alot of laptops have crap antennas i did this with my PSP one day coz the motherboard stoped spining the drive so i had spare space to do something with, it
improved by heaps you just got to find the right pigtail cable :)
I like it.
i did this same thing on my hp notebook about a year ago.
works great.
I did something similar.
But I have the aerial velcroed to the lid connected by a pigtail from the wifi card in the laptop.
So when the lid is up the aerial is completely out of the way of the keyboard.
i used to make antennas like this and fab corp has an excellent selection of equipment for modders
http://www.fab-corp.com/
I did this for my Compaq N600C, the modem port is top right of the case so it’s neatly tucked next to the lcd and doesn’t get in the way of the keyboard, the antenna i liberated from a 2.4gig AV receiver, yeah it works great, signal is improved as much as 600%
I think what would have been smarter would have been to use a male phone wall plug and integrate the antenna wiring with it. Take the internals and rewire the female end so that it would receive the antenna. This way you can plug/unplug the antenna as needed and not break it off putting it in you bag.
M4|\|T3
sorry, doesnt work. The antenna signals go over coax since it’s an impedance controlled line. If you send them over a phone plug it will cause severe signal loss.
Doesn’t seem like much of a hack. A more professional “hack” would have been to take an actual laptop internal wifi antenna(many from Toshiba have alot of gain and very long pig-tails) and install it behind the LCD like it is supposed to be. Many good internal laptop antennas have gain on the order of 3 or 4 dB, while the little whip antenna in the photo is only good for about 1dB gain. I’ll admit, I did do this myself one time, but it was on a laptop that already had built in wireless(and antennas) so the purpose was to be able to connect an external 24dB grid antenna. I was also able to add my external SMA connector without sacrificing one of the existing jacks, and I don’t see why he couldn’t have done the same…
^^^Lack of ability to capitalize *sucks*, especially on a site that is scientifically oriented. Terms like SMA and dB need capitalization.
mw=milliwatt
mw=megawatt
wtf?????
fdfd
gia phu