Monday, January 21, 2013

Onwards and Upwards

I do love tinkering with things since I was a kid. Sometimes I even made my own toys from parts of old ones, sticks, or whatever I could lay my hands on.

Eventually, my love for tinkering, especially with electronics, made me take up BS Electronics and Communications Engineering at UST. Granted, I never got a career related to being an ECE, still, it was an experience well worth it.

Anyway, one of the best electronics I've ever bought is my Linksys WRT610N router. It's a simultaneous band router, meaning it serves up wifi simultaneously on the 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequency. I got it around 2009 i think, for 5,000php, as barely used (less than a month i think), which was a steal, since it was going around for 7-8k at that time.



So it's been loyally serving me for more than 4 years, and it's been chugging along quite nicely at 300Mbps wifi, and 1Gigabit on wired. I've flashed the firmware from stock linksys ROM to dd-wrt which really opened up possibilities for this router.

But my complaint was I wanted a longer range for it, but since it didn't have removeable external antennas, I had to rely on using UTP cables to really maximize the range for my network. Unfortunately, this doesnt work for devices which didn't have Ethernet ports (the tablets and the mobile phones).

Fortunately for me, I came across info about being able to add external antennas. All I needed were U.FL to RP-SMA pigtails. So i logged onto ebay, ordered a number of them from Hongkong, and 1 month later, I get to mod my trusty router.






So there you have it. From a poor 0 to 1 bar wifi signal from my bathroom, to a steady 2 bar wifi signal.

Now I can surf to my heart's content while doing a number 1.