Episode: 2041
Title: HPR2041: Router Antennas More = better ?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2041/hpr2041.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 13:36:54

---

This is HPR episode 2041 entitled Router and Tennis More Equals Better.
It is posted by first-time post-ile dustinger and in about 8 minutes long, the summer is
a ham operator's new on Router and Tennis.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15 that's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
Hi everybody, this is Ken.
We've got some excellent news for you before today's show.
We've been nominated for the People's Choice Podcast Award and that's an ongoing thing
by the community to recognize shows doing good podcasts and we have been shortlisted
in the technology section.
Some other people, congratulations to the Budcast as well, who've also been nominated.
If you want to vote for us and any other shows that you enjoy, go over to podcastaward.com.
That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-A-W-A-R-D-S dot com.
Scroll down to the end and you'll find us in the technology section where listed there
as first.
And one interesting thing is you can vote every single day for the next two weeks so you
will have me reminding you of this.
Please do so because it's really, really good exposure for HPR and hopefully we'll get
more listeners.
We'll be able to spread the word and with more listeners we'll get more contributors
and more contributors.
The schedule will fill up and you'll have to listen to me a lot less.
So, please go ahead and do that and the reason for the daily voting is, and then reading
from the website, daily voting for a two week period is designed to show show engagement
and to allow shows of all sides to compete for a podcast award.
To list their engagement, the true power of a podcast audience ultimately determines
the annual winners.
So, folks, even if you have never contributed a show to HPR, this is something that we really
appreciate that you could do, and if you're over there, it'll take about two minutes
of your time.
Do it every single day, no scripts please, though.
Do it every day, and thank you very much for doing that.
Tune in for today's show, goodbye.
Tune in for today's show, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
Okay, you guys shame me into submitting a podcast, listen, and I've been with Linux about
a year now, and having a lot of fun, learning a lot of stuff.
I wanted to put something, but I kind of wanted to, something maybe, people would get something
out of it.
I thought, well, I don't really know a whole lot about Linux, listen to a lot of podcasts,
had a problem with my router here at my house, about probably 30 devices, tablets, everything,
everything.
And the router just, it was, it was a little netgare, it was still bad, but it just wasn't quite
cutting it.
I sent a question in to another show, the mini PC show, Dordidord Geek, and when he was
answering, he said, more antennas is better, and I said, really, I've been a hammering
over operator for 40 years, and nori antennas doesn't necessarily make it better, pencil
holly work.
I said, well, I'll just, I'm going to research a little bit on podcasts and kind of let
people know that, you know, more antennas really are better.
Well, I found out something, more antennas could be better, turns out that if it's configured
right and it can adjust the antennas electrically inside, it can actually enhance the signal
and get rid of unwanted ones and kind of being the signal, I'll explain it further here,
with the rest of this podcast, trying to piece it together, this is my first one, hope
somebody gets a little bit out of it, but bottom line is, yes, I think it could work.
Just as a hammering operator, I can tell you the more open and clear you can put your router
in, if you stuff it in a bootcase or in the corner somewhere, you know, it's not going
to perform as well.
One is open and clear as you can get it and preferably, you know, this sounds kind
of stupid, but somebody won't get it.
You want to kind of center it in a geographically, because it's going to cover so many feet.
Well, here it goes, thanks.
Listening to a podcast or a particular podcast or say, this router has got to be better,
it has more antennas.
Well, more antennas isn't necessarily better.
The way I believe it works, we've all seen semi-trucks on the road where they'll have
two antennas on the cab, one whip on one mirror and one whip on the other mirror.
What those antennas do is kind of being the signal forward and backwards, the spacing
and the feed line, all placed together to give signal more in one direction than another.
If you think of a light bulb as an antenna, a regular incandescent light bulb will just
shine light all over everywhere, 360 degrees around.
If you could put a mirror behind it, then it shines light and reflects in one direction.
So you essentially double the intensity of the light by putting no light behind it.
Seven more antennas gets the signal to be shaped instead of, as a sphere, more like
a football-type pattern.
Staying with our semi-truck analogy, I said the spacing and the feed line work together
to make the signal for the CBR go backwards and forwards, because instead of right and
left, because he's usually a young interstate, and he wants to talk to the trucks in front
of him and behind him, so he wants to send all the signal forward and backwards.
The electrical distance, the speed that the radio waves travel through the coax from
one antenna to the other, and that distance is what determines the pattern that the signals
will go.
You can't really, the truck driver can't, he's not going to change the, he can't, the mirrors
on the truck are so far apart, so all he can really change is the feed line coax.
So if our truck driver is just up and down as all he wants, north and south on the interstate
side, but if you're a Henry operator and say you wanted to talk east and west instead
of north and south, by putting in different feed lines with different lengths of coax,
you could change the signal to go instead of north and south, east and west, just by changing
the coax.
The router's sort of working like this.
The interesting thing about this is it starts out listening maybe on all the antennas and
it kind of figures out which where this particular device has the, is coming from.
So it turns the antennas on and off, changes the pattern.
So it really can directionally go, we're going to enhance the signal by turning these
on, these off, or changing how it switches the, the transmit and the receive.
It's called beam form and it's pretty interesting.
Well this really increased the range of your router.
Maybe marginally, I don't know, everything would have to be tested, you know, and it's
kind of hard to test things because everything is influenced by something else.
The thing where it really could shine is not necessarily to increase, but it could decrease
the unwanted signals.
It could help to separate signals on the same frequencies.
It seemed like to me that it would help to have a lot of devices, smart TVs, whatever tablets,
all trying to talk to the router at one time.
Of course, this is assuming they're coming from different directions, it wouldn't help
if the TV and the laptop were right next to each other in relation to the router.
So in theory, if all those antennas receive slightly different signals and the computer
inside the router could decide which direction the signal was coming from, it could reconfigure
how it sends signals and receive signals from all the different antennas to beam the signal
in one direction.
So it could work.
I hope people got something from this.
If anybody wants to be, I know a little more details I gave here for sure.
You can email me at loudlestinger at gmail.com, it'll hopefully be on the webpage.
You've been listening to heckaPublicRadio at heckaPublicRadio.org.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contributing to find out
how easy it really is.
HeckaPublicRadio was founded by the digital dog pound and the infonomicum computer club
and is part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment
on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself.
Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released on the creative commons, attribution,
share a light 3.0 license.