Any simple hardware mod for reception improvement?
- Thread starter fanbanlo
- Start date
someoneElse
New member
fanbanlo said:
I've found that getting the dongle and antenna as far away from the PC as possible improves reception a bit. My system is next to a large bookshelf, so I have my remote wonder dongle placed as high as it can be stuck to the back of the bookshelf with some blutac. With that placement alone I could get reception to the back corner of my living room, a little over twenty feet or seven meters away.
You can improve this even more with a USB extension cable, such as those that come with many USB flash drives or memory card readers that plug directly into the port.
Get it as far away from the PC and monitor as you can, and as high up as possible. If there are a lot of walls or hard structure in between it and the problem area, try moving the dongle around to a position that minimizes the amount of obstruction. That may or may not be feasible depending on how much of an extension you have.
As far as mods go, all that come to mind that are simple would be a simple antenna extension. You should be able to open up the dongle easily with a screwdriver and attach a larger antenna wire, etc. Different wire will have different effects depending on the frequency used for the signal.
If you have a specific area that needs concentrated reception, you can try to make a simple cantenna or parabolic wave antenna for the reciever dongle, and point it in the general direction of the problem area to try and boost reception from the remote. You'd have to find or design the proper curve for a parabolic wave antenna for use with the frequencies used, as most designs out there are made for 802.11/wifi.
shasha
New member
Sounds like the remote is bad. I have owned 3 sets now and one of them was just a dud no matter what I did. 2 of them would work from anywhere in the house and the 3rd was good from about 6 feet, hit and miss. I ended up just buying a new one off of E-Bay for a few bucks. I tried extending antennas, resoldering everything, only thing I didn't do was try to tune it with the variable choke that was inside of it. I don't have a RF freq analyzer so it would have been pretty futile.