So laying around I have one of my old laptops; a Thinkpad T23. Now I’d added wireless to this like 4 years ago using a mini-pci card, only cause I was using some shitty antennas, the signal was shite. Even in the same room as the AP I was getting pretty much no signal.

So in my boredom a few weeks back I decided to start my genius plan to improve this. Many, many years ago (like at least 10) I’d used a similar solution to fix my shitty TV reception. The solution was to  extend the antennas using kitchen foil. This sounds rather… Wile E Coyote, but it worked pretty well back then. So I thought, why can’t it work here?

I took apart the screen of the laptop, to reveal the shitty antennas that I’d installed all those years ago:

These I think were never intended to be LCD antennas, as I had to bend them into place, I’m pretty sure they were keyboard mounted ones.

So I cut them off just at the end of the wire, and then proceeded to try and solder the foil onto the end. This took absolutely ages, as I’m pretty sure you can’t solder aluminium using tin solder, but whatever, it worked eventually:

Now after I’d done this it was getting pretty late, so I shoved the whole thing onto my side and went to bed. It sat here for probably 2 months until a couple of weeks ago when I got a new bed, and had to empty my room of shit to get the damn thing in. I decided to actually put it together properly instead of leaving it. After much shouting to get the damn wire to follow the path *I* wanted, it turned out pretty well (I fucked with the levels so you can see:

After spending years trying to get the damn LCD back into place without breaking it, I booted the thing up..only to realise it had a failed attempt at a FreeBSD compile on it which just kernel panic’d. (I still never figured out what I did, but whatever). Again, I threw it onto the side and went onto other things.

This week, I finally decided I should actually see how my work went. I went upstairs and plugged in my backup disc to cookiemonster, then came down and booted up Symantec Ghost, restored an image I had; which turned out to be like 4 years old as well, which was pretty interesting. Turns out my hack has worked incredibly well:

That was taken the other side of my house to the AP, whereas before I’d get barely one bar in the same room, not bad, I’ll think you’ll agree.