Antenna or signal booster for 24ghz wifi?

I live in a building approximately 80 feet tall. I want to have a wifi antenna at the top of my roof (I'll put my router there too) beaming wifi to the whole street in front of me.

I have two options that cost exactly the same amount:


1- I can get a (or two) 6dbi 180 degree H 40 degree V UNIdirectional antenna and point it so the street is covered by the 40 V degrees.

2- I can get a (or two) 30 dbm 1w booster and add it to my existing stock linksys wifi antenna.

Which of these choices will send the singnal further or with more strength?



Please keep in mind that I did a test with my stock linksys omnidirectional antenna on my roof and I was able to pick up the signal 600 feet away in both directions (at which point I lost visual sight of the router and the signal cut)

uni directional is good for having it in one concentrated area and i'm assuming they're kinda shaped dish like right? sorta in a partial U shape pattern. the omni's are nice too, but you wont get the range from them like the uni since its not blasting 360 degrees.


another thing you can try is boost the wifi gain, however, that may not be in stock firmwares. ddwrt has it for sure that i know of and you can ramp it up to 200Mw, but thats also against FCC regulations

blackjackel said:

I live in a building approximately 80 feet tall. I want to have a wifi antenna at the top of my roof (I'll put my router there too) beaming wifi to the whole street in front of me.

I have two options that cost exactly the same amount:


1- I can get a (or two) 6dbi 180 degree H 40 degree V UNIdirectional antenna and point it so the street is covered by the 40 V degrees.

2- I can get a (or two) 30 dbm 1w booster and add it to my existing stock linksys wifi antenna.

Which of these choices will send the singnal further or with more strength?



Please keep in mind that I did a test with my stock linksys omnidirectional antenna on my roof and I was able to pick up the signal 600 feet away in both directions (at which point I lost visual sight of the router and the signal cut)

Click to expand...

for that spec, you do want a unidirectional antenna. you could play with a yagi type and select how far or how wide your range goes.

gangaskan said:

uni directional is good for having it in one concentrated area and i'm assuming they're kinda shaped dish like right? sorta in a partial U shape pattern. the omni's are nice too, but you wont get the range from them like the uni since its not blasting 360 degrees.


another thing you can try is boost the wifi gain, however, that may not be in stock firmwares. ddwrt has it for sure that i know of and you can ramp it up to 200Mw, but thats also against FCC regulations

Click to expand...

omnidirectional is full 360 degree, like an cisco 1131.
unidirectional points the beam out in a direction, but is not tightly focussed.
yagi, the beam can either be like a unidirectional's type, or it can be adjusted to be focussed for a narrow width but much longer distance

It depends on just how much power your router is currently putting out. If your Linksys is like most and putting out ~30mW, then a boost up to 1W would provide about 15dB of gain. If you have your Linksys putting out much higher powers (say 100mW), then a boost up to 1W would provide "only" 10dB of gain.

The rub though is in just how good the amp will be at increasing the strength of recieved signals. Being able to "talk" 10dB louder means nothing if your "hearing" hasn't also improved. Most wifi amps are bidirectional and will also amplify the received signal somewhat, though you'll want to take a look at its datasheet to know just how much.

An antenna with increased gain will help you out as well, though probably not as much as the 1W amp. However, there is an advantage to antennas over amps: they're directional! While amplifying the signal from your Linksys's dipole may do the job quite nicely, you're still "wasting" signal by broadcasting in directions you don't need. You're also amplifying recieved signals from directions you don't need, which means that your signal-to-noise ratio won't improve at all. A directional antenna will focus all the transmitting energy into the desired area (reducing "waste") and be more selective to received signals from the desired area (increasing signal-to-noise ratio).

All said I think I'd go with an amp if you're in a "quiet" area where your wifi signal is pretty much the only thing transmitting at 2.4GHz, and an antenna if you're in a "noisy" area. The antenna probably won't provide as much gain, but will have improved signal-to-noise ratio which is important when there is a reasonable amount of noise


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Not all omnidirectional antennas are created equal... Although your Linksys probably has nothing better than a 2.4dBi dipole antenna, you can find other omnidirectional antennas with higher gain.

A dipole has a 360-degree beamwidth horizontally, and a 90-degree beamwidth vertically. However, you can stack several antennas on top of each other to create a "colinear array" to increase the gain. For example, if you made a stack of four dipoles, the resulting antenna would retain its 360-degree horizontal beamwidth, but have 8.4dBi of gain! It achieves this though by flattening the vertical radiation pattern down, in this case to about a 23-degree vertical beamwidth.
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