Wow! We built that thing 22 years ago! Fun to see it pop up like this periodically.
Here's a link to the 10th anniversary: https://makezine.com/article/home/food-beverage/pringles-can...
I built one of these when at university in 2008. The AP was up the other end of a long hallway and through many rebar concrete walls. Whenever I needed to download a dataset I would stick it out in the corridor.
It was the first time I purchased Pringles.
Do not confuse this "Cantenna" with the Heathkit "HN-31 Cantenna", which (despite having a RF connector) serves a somewhat different purpose...
I made one ages ago using a Baileys Irish Cream can and can confirm everything worked great, both the cantenna and the Irish Cream:^)
This and a bunch of WRT54Gs bought for five dollars each because they were bricked let me do wifi for my whole apartment building while I was a senior in uni living off campus. Got the best connection I could afford from comcast and basically I became a mini ISP. I charged five bucks a month to 20 people and it paid for my own connection basically. The trick was that my own packets had priority :)
If you're interested in DIY Antennas, you could take a look at this youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/andrewmcneil/videos
Much theory and DIY concepts for cool antenna designs. I like the BiQuad design:
I built one of these in ~2004 to get internet from a Flying J a little over a mile from a house we were renting. Used a pringles can for a bit but a large can of yams worked much better. Used it for a few months until our neighborhood got actual internet service (and we lost line of sight to the truck stop)
I still have a couple of cantennas that I made, oh, about 20 years or so ago. There was a coffee shop half a block from me that didn't have any WiFi (owner behind the times), so I set up a WRT54G with DD-WRT as a client bridge, hooked a cantenna to it, and pointed it at the coffee shop. With the cantenna at the other end, I was able to get a solid signal.
These days? With mobile data anywhere I'm likely to go, that's more trouble than needed. Aside from that, modern WiFi isn't really conducive to external antennas.
Wavelength (mm) ≈ Velocity of wave (Mm/sec) / Frequency (GHz)
w = v / f
We know v will be 300 (rounded up based on the speed of light mentioned above). For f, we need to plug in the Wi-Fi frequency.
You could just use 2.4, but in order to be a little more accurate, we will use two more decimal places. For channel 6 in the 2.4GHz spectrum, we need to plug in 2.437. Solving for w yields ~123mm.
w = 300 Mm / 2.437 GHz w = 123.102175
Now that we know the (w)avelength for our radio (f)requency, we can begin calculating the dimensions of the can based on the guidelines mentioned previously.
Built one of these with my dad when I was about 8, and this was one of the things that got me bitten by the "working with computers" bug.
I build something similar when I was a teenager. I actually worked amazingly well as an antenna for DVB-T
Man that takes me back. I used to torrent my media with a giant Yagi antenna mounted to a tripod that'd let me connect to the McDonald's down the road.
I would imagine that you’d probably need to build two these days—one for 2.4 GHz and one for 5 GHz—then bond them together with a diplexer.
Is there any way to increase 4g LTE reception like this without using any "active" devices?
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/466/
Built one of these back in 2007 to hook up to my WiFi card in the barracks in Japan. Hacked the card a bit to push the power higher than allowed (firmware) and pretty much had the best signal ever for internet, at the cost of everyone else near me. Note that the AP was about 20 feet from my window, so I was just trying to drown everyone else out, not extend my range.
Got some flak from my 1st Sergeant at the time, but that was about it. At least I could raid in WoW, unlike everyone else on that godawful WISP.