Aluminum Foil and Wi-Fi Signals

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Put away your tinfoil hats and grab your aluminum foil
WiFi antennas. It's time to talk about how to boost
your wireless internet signal. I'm jovin Strickland and this is
tech stuff Daily. It sounds a bit like an urban
myth you can boost your WiFi signal reach with a
little aluminum foil shaped a particular way. But as it

(00:26):
turns out, the science holds up. What's next? Are we
going to find out that blowing into an old Nintendo
cartridge really does make it work better? Side note, don't
blow into cartridges. You're more likely to gum things up
to make them better. All right, back to the WiFi.
The research is out of Dartmouth University. She has jal And,
assistant professor, spoke about the project. She said that all

(00:48):
it takes is about thirty five dollars worth of materials
to create a reflector capable of shaping WiFi signals. There's
no need for repeaters or signal boosters. You can do
it all yourself booming you have access to a three
D printer. That is. The research team took an interesting
approach to their work. They took inspiration from d I.
Y communities that had experimented with using aluminum cans to

(01:11):
direct WiFi signals. Essentially, these groups had cut cans open
to turn them into sheets of thin aluminum, and then
attached those sheets to a router's antenna. The sheets would
block signals going out in that direction and redirect them
in the opposing direction. It worked, but it wasn't very precise.
The team thought they could dial this in a bit.

(01:31):
They developed software that does all the number crunching for you.
In order to make a design that will suit your needs,
you plug in some parameters into the software, giving it
information about the size and shape of the room that
the router is in. Maybe you want to boost the
signal in one direction and curtail it in another. For example,
you might want your wireless router located near a window,

(01:52):
and you'd rather not broadcast your WiFi signal out to
your entire neighborhood. By reshaping that signal, you can direct
it where you want. This isn't just efficient, it's potentially
more secure. WiFi sniffers will have a harder time connecting
to your routers signal if that signal is being redirected
inside your home rather than outside. Once the software has
done all its beat boop boop calculations, it designs a

(02:14):
three dimensional shape calibrated precisely to the information you've fed
the software. That includes taking into account the directions where
you want a stronger signal and the ones where you'd
like to prevent the signal from bleeding over into other regions,
such as the street outside your house. The three D
shape acts like a reflector. It's sort of like the
bowl on a satellite dish. After getting the design for

(02:35):
the shape, you have to then make the darn thing.
This is most easily done with a three D printer.
Three D printers are a type of additive manufacturing, meaning
they create shapes by adding to a foundation layer by layer. Typically,
a printer does this by laying down a sticky layer
of plastic material on a heated platform. The plastic adheres
to the platform enough to stay in place as the

(02:57):
printer lays down another thin layer, and another and another.
This happens over and over until the collection of layers
reaches the dimensions of the object you set to print.
Smaller objects tend to be easier to print than larger ones,
mostly because you don't have to worry about the structural
integrity of the object quite as much. There are three
D printers that can build objects out of stuff other

(03:17):
than plastic, but generally speaking you're less likely to run
into those in the consumer market. If you've got the time, money,
and as we found out in our office, the patients
to work with a three D printer, you can purchase
one for yourself and start churning out the chatch keys. Otherwise,
you can do a quick search online to see if
there are any three D printing businesses that can take
on custom jobs. Once printed, you then cote the three

(03:41):
D object in aluminum foil. This gives the object it's
reflective properties. The shape determines where the signal will go
once it bounces off the object. The combination of those
two is what allows you to reshape WiFi signals. The
aluminum foil and shape aren't actually boosting the signal in
any way. That is, they're not making a weak signals strong.
They do redirect the signal so that it might more

(04:03):
efficiently reach the areas within a space you designate, but
it doesn't make your WiFi magically better. Keep in mind
that WiFi is ultimately radio waves. The frequencies for WiFi
are in the two point four and five giga hurts
ranges in the United States. So why those ranges? Well,
there are a couple of reasons. The big one is
that the radio frequency spectrum is really valuable real estate.

(04:26):
If you were to broadcast two different things along the
same frequency, like TV signals and WiFi, let's say you
didn't counter interference. That's not good whether you want to
log into the world of warcraft or watch your stories.
So you have to set aside blocks of frequencies for
specific uses. That way, you can be reasonably sure that
one technology won't meddle with another. The Dartmouth team has

(04:49):
yet to release a build of the software they used
to design the three D shapes. Without that software, you're
not likely to create a reflector that's going to be
very useful. You might even make your signal more difficult
to connect to. Hopefully the team will either create a
software product people can purchase, or even release their program
for free so that anyone can take advantage of their research.

(05:09):
To learn more about the Internet, WiFi, radio frequencies, and
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I'll see you again soon.