Wireless antenna

We’re stuck in a lead lined valley where all man made signals are blocked dead. Both Bell and Rogers cell phone signals are reduced to the occasional one bar (although texting seems to work fine) and FM is an ocean of hiss. A while ago we put in a 3’ FM aerial in the loft which has given us the strong FM stations in the area - as long as we only use the radios in the living room where the coax cable comes in.

This has recently been a bit of issue since we moved from Satellite internet to cell based internet (since you ask the phone exchange is too far away for DSL and no one is going lay cable our way this soon). Even at 0-1 bars on the Rogers network the internet was still faster than Satellite. The problem is that the software on the other end saw all the errors and decided to slow our connection to a crawl. So once a week we had to ring up and get the account reset which was a bit of pain.

Looking to the internets for rescue it seemed as a making an antenna was as easy as pie. Well not for me it wasn’t. I tried a number of models and none of them worked so eventually it was time to give up and go professional.

Wireless antenna

Now this works a treat. We’ve gone from 0-1 bars to 2-3 and lovely fast internet. Of course, we still pay per GB (thank you Rogers) which means keeping a close eye on the kids video habit. But hey, at least we can surf in real time :)

Incidentally, the antenna is mounted on some 2” PVC attached to the washing line. Stylish, no?