Increasing WiFi Range

Omnia hardware Omnia HW tweaks
1

My Omnia is in a corner of the house (near my cable modem and server), and it has noticeably less full-bandwidth range on 2.4 GHz than the high-power AP/router it replaced. I don’t notice any difference on 5 GHz.

I figure I have two basic choices to increase antenna gain:

  1. Change the antennas to higher gain omnis: http://www.ebay.com/itm/3-9dBi-RP-SMA-WiFi-Dual-Band-Antennas-for-Asus-RT-N66U-RT-AC66U-AC1750-D-link-/112048855825?_trksid=p2141725.m3641.l6368

  2. Add some small Yagi elements to the existing antennas: http://ham-radio.com/k6sti/wifiyagi.htm

Or perhaps a combination of both.

At this point I’m leaning toward the Yagi simply to avoid dumping signal on my neighbors.

Thoughts?

2

I remember that someone mentioned that he used these antenas:
http://www.linksys.com/us/p/P-WRT004ANT/
here it is:

3

could you post the output of
iwinfo wlan1 txpower
and
iw reg get

4

Remember that higher gain means more directionality. Higher gain omnis produce a flatter doughnut shape so will radiate a lot less energy in the vertical plane. If you have a one-floor appartment that may be a good idea, but given you say the Omnia is in the corner of the house, any onmi will be radiating a significant portion of its energy into the wall away from the house. Replacing the low-gain omnis with low-gain MiMo patch antenna with say 120 degree beam width would allow you to transmit the vast majority of the energy into the rest of the house without losing wide angle coverage there.

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