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jellybaby
Some of you guys who know me IRL will know that I've been a life long radio nerd. When I was a kid I used to build and sell pirate radio transmitters to DJs and studios in London before going legit and getting my radio amateur license in the mid 90s (long since lapsed). Now days, I spend my spare time contributing to various IoT and amateur satellite projects but my real passion is radio communications. Anyway, setting the scene but I digress.
I noticed a long time ago that every single wifi device I have ever dissected was fitted with terrible quality antennas. Most wifi antennas as supplied by manufacturers are adequate at best, utlising crude coax sleathed dipoles (aka bazooka antennas) or very basic PCB based dipoles. The problem with these antennas is that while designed to work across both wifi bands, they are quite narrow band in design, slightly directional and overall very innefficient which means they don't do very well on either 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz.
If people have wifi signal problems at home they tend to look for a cheap solution and often go to Amazon or eBay where there are plenty of aftermarket antennas for sale for between £5 and £20 but unfortunately these are invariably worse than stock antennas. At best they are missold (common to see old 3G antennas labelled as Wifi) and at worse they are so badly made they barely work at all (commonly using extremely cheap high loss cable).
I did a few experiments recently and made a few dual band wifi antennas and was blown away by how much better they work than the usual shit that gets bundled with routers and PCIe cards. Funnily enough, good quality components and proper tuning doesn't seem to happen in the factory at Netgear, Huawei etc.
If anybody is having any signal problems and have devices that use external antennas, I'd be glad to knock one up for the cost of parts and P&P to see if it helps avoid buying a mesh setup when it could just be the quality of the antenna letting you down. Would expect that costs will be lower than £10 including P&P.