this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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I still have a soft spot for troll physics. Needs more magnets, though.
How do they work‽
would you be interested in talking to a scientist?
By interacting with the m dimensional component of the em waves
What astounds me is despite being a crappy drawing, the person drew that fan with proper perspective and proportion.
Yeah, but that makes the waves more choppy and stormlike which increases degradation of the equipment on the other side as the waves collide more strongly against it.
NSFW
~~Only~~ Wififans 😳
The moving parts could disturb MIMO
Anon accidentally recreates the Michelson-Morley experiment.
Ehm sure. Look the red waves in the lower picture are definitely longer. Voila!
It will probably reflect some of the radiation. Wifi reception will be poorer behind the aluminium and possibly better in front.
A cheapskates version of a directional antenna.
Indeed, although this type of thing was more common with older wifi generations, so I'm not surprised kids these days wont know.
For example: We cut the top off an old beer can, poked a hole and stuck it onto the antenna to have stable download speeds across a courtyard.
I remember like 15 or 20 years ago the popular thing was printable papercraft doohickeys that you'd cut out and glue together with aluminum foil on the backside that were like little satellite dishes that mounted on the antennas that were supposed to boost/aim your wifi signal. I gave them a try, but if they made a difference it wasn't big enough to be noticeable.
Reminds me of the diy antenna made out of copper wire, an empty CD spool and a single CD on its back. Those antennas could work as far as 1km if there was no obstruction, or 400m through light obstructions. It was awesome.
We used to do this with antennas for tvs (those circular ones) It used to work in rains too
Yeah, one of our problems was rain and thick fog causing massive drops and even disconnects on the connection going out from the router as 2.4Ghz really doesn't like water. The antenna on our side was fine for sending signals back we just couldn't get it stable incoming, which is why we did the can trick.
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I unironically do something similar to this. In my area, the only options are a dogshit local WISP, Starlink/other satellite, or (where possible) cellular.
I am one of the "lucky" people who are able to use cell for my internet, however whether it's the cell company having a craptastic network, software/hardware bugs on the my customer equipment, or a combination of both, there is only ONE cell tower I can connect to which yields a useful connection.
All other towers result in the equipment failing to connect to the tower, connecting but failing to get an internet connection, or only yielding download speeds 5Mbit of less.
I have found that by shoving sheet metal around my ISP's equipment, I can quite easily block off the non-functional towers and ensure they're never connected to. I don't think speeds are any better, but it does help with reliability.
I wonder if it's not only boxing the other towers but also boring the signal to the one you are aiming at, because you put a big mirror behind
Both to some degree, realistically. I used an old collander as a signal reflector for a wifi dongle on the end of a USB extension cable and was able to boost the signal up to about 4x, or maybe half the range of the purpose-built and highly directional Yagi antenna I eventually bought to replace that kludge.
I have tried that. I have a dish taken from a directional WiFi antenna. When placed behind the gateway, it sometimes increases speeds, sometimes hurts speeds, and sometimes does nothing. I found it a bit too inconsistent, and a bit too ugly, to be used permanently. If I had a proper mounting solution, I might have gotten it tuned just right, however at that point I would rather just buy and mount external antennas to hook into the gateway.
My exact deployment today actually doesn't even have anything behind the gateway. That is just because for my specific case, all the towers it can reach are within a roughly 90 degree field of view. To block the bad ones, I really only need to block off a few sections of the window it's sitting near.
You might want to search on the word cantenna. Helped set up a cantenna for a friend's parents once. They lived in a lake house for a few years, but they were in a dead zone for pretty much everything. They had a cell booster that would occasionally get a single if luck was on your side, but once we set up the cantenna on the booster, they had a steady signal .
Long live the Pringles cantenna
~~pringles can is too small for 2.4ghz cantenna,~~ it's near cutoff frequency but just barely, you need 10cm-ish diameter can or shorter 16cm-ish can
I once made one of these with a bigger can and mounted it on an old 10' satellite dish. Managed to get Wi-Fi across several thousand yards without issue
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Wardriving intensifies
I did this back in 2010-13, to get better internet in my house! It was a video from a youtube, where he used cereal box with aluminum.
Keeps out the conspiracy-based posts and only lets facts through.
Directs the wifi.
In all different directions...
Back in my day, we used a Pringles can.
When I was a kid we would connect a coat hanger to the TV to get the news from 2 towns over
We still do. It's a fun trick.
I still go war-driving from time to time. 🙂
I used to steal Wi-Fi with an outdated Linux installation DVD.
It's not stealing if the wifi is just being broadcast unencrypted.
Didn't say anything about the effectiveness.............
This can actually be beneficial if your router is right at the corner of your house. The foil acts as a reflector for some of the radiation that would've been wasted, and thus improves the signal quality within your house.
To actually be beneficial as a reflector, the foil would need to be a specific distance from the antenna, which should be a certain fraction of the wavelength. Source: I used to make parabolic reflectors out of milk cartons about twenty years ago.
This is basic interference physics.
I am 80% sure this is a net loss with modern mu-mimo radios, and it will absolutely trash your phy rate
Remember Pringles antennas? Same energy.
Remember windsurfers? You put them on the single antenna of your old linsky router.
Not as effective as the anti-5G wire cages.
I stumbled onto these on Amazon last night actually. The user submitted video reviews are insane. I was screaming. I got to the head scarf that blocks the 5Gs and I had to stop.
EMF BLOCKING BASEBALL CAP
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uh, is this real?
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