Parabolic Wi-Fi Dish

Make a parabolic Wi-Fi dish to boost your Wi-Fi reception from junk laying around your house. This simple project was not intended to be a masterpiece of mechanical engineering. It is simply my idea of how to make your Wi-Fi signal a little better hopefully without spending much cash.

The way a Parabolic works is that it reflects the signal from a larger surface area than that of the antenna alone. Then concentrates it at the focal point. This dish as crude as it may look gives me ~13db gain receiving from the same router it was before. Don't confuse this as a booster it has no power so it is not amplifying the signal it is only concentrating it. Thank goes to rimar2000 for pointing out my lack of description.

This thing isn't all that good looking but if you consider that I am getting a signal from my brothers house over 300 yards from my apartment threw 2 walls made of dry wall. ! brick wall. Across a major road. Threw his brick wall to his router.

Without the dish I was getting a signal quality of 4-7% signal 1Mbps link and constant drop outs.

Now I get
link Speed 18Mbps
Signal -79
Noise -90
SNR 11
Signal Quality 19%
www.Speedtest.net    Test Download 7Mbps Upload 1.5Mbps

You are going to need:

1/4" Threaded rod
Electrical or Duct Tape
Cardboard
Aluminum foil
Some kind of adhesive like spray glue, rubber cement, or elmers Glue
A few old CDs
And anything else I forget to list!!

Step 1 Step 1: Calculations

Step 1: Calculations
The first thing you are going to want to do is understand somewhat how a parabolic dish works. You can do a bunch of Googleing and reading and still not understand the mathematics behind wave angle, Illumination angles, etc. Lucky for the not so math savvy some people smatter then me have done all the hard work in a multitude or simple programs. I have chosen “Parabola Calculator 2.0” found here http://mscir.tripod.com/parabola/.

For my dish I have decided to go with 68cm diameter and a depth of 18cm. (That’s about 27inch diameter 6.25inch deep). I recommend you use metric (CM) to do all your measuring as it is easy to figure the lengths with the program. Naturally in this case the bigger the better. A larger dish will collect more of a signal. So if you feel frogy go right on ahead and make yours 6 foot.

Input your Diameter and Depth into Parabola Calculator and hit calculate. It will draw (with default setting) a dish in blue and the focal length in red. Notice that when to hover your mouse over the black area you get a cross and some numbers X and Y will appear at the bottom of the window. The numbers indicate the distance from the deepest part of the dish (center) out to the edge (X) and how deep they are (Y).

Comments

[rmedan]

it really nice...Can we use umbrella and wrap it with alluminium foil?...Thanks..

[thekraftyrhino]

it may work the key is the arc

[rimar2000]

Nice work!

I do a subtle clarification: your parable don't boosts the wifi, it only redirect it toward a desired point. The difference begins to be important if you have two receptors (in example two notebooks) at opposite or angled directions.

[thekraftyrhino]

Thanks for the clarification. I don't believe I used the word "Boost" You are correct as it has no power it does no boosting. The way a Parabolic works is that it reflects the signal from a larger surface area than that of the antenna alone. Then concentrates it at the focal point. This dish as crude as it may look gives me ~13db gain recieving from the same router it was before.

I added a clarification to the Intro

Thanks