Author: Mark Snell

Hey there do-it-yourself technicians. Do you have Wi-Fi dead spots in your home or office? In this video, I’ll show you some free and some inexpensive ways to get wi-fi into those dead spots.

Okay, we’ve talked a lot about routers and Wi-Fi in the last couple of episodes, and one of the questions I get quite a lot is how to extend the range of Wi-Fi in your home or workplace. Maybe it’s a corner of the house that has a flaky signal, or maybe you want to use a downstairs room as a work from home office, but the internet just isn’t good enough down there. Or maybe your small business has expanded to the office next door, and you want better coverage for your mobile devices.

You can, of course, run a blue ethernet cable from one room to the next or even round the doorway down the stairs. I’ve done that, and it works, but there’s often other people around who frown on that sort of thing and complain that it looks ugly or it’s a tripping hazard.

There must be a better way, you think, and you’re right, there is. There are a couple of different ways to get a better signal, but first, we need to learn a bit more about Wi-Fi and how it’s transmitted.

Direction, the wi-fi in many routers, is quite directional. This router creates a great signal for about 20 to 30 meters in front of it, but if you go even three or four meters behind it, the signal drops off to just about nothing.
The pattern is quite flat, and looking at the antennas, it’s fairly obvious that it’s designed to point in just one direction. With many routers, it’s a bit more difficult to tell the orientation, and they may even have multiple antennas internally to give a better signal. this new router I have is basically a box and gives quite a good signal in just about every direction. This older one is quite flat, and I suspect it gives a much better signal facing the large sides than it does the front or the back. Moving around facing it in different directions might be enough to get the better signal you need. Lifting it up higher might also be good, too and avoid the next obstacle interference.

Interference is becoming less of an issue as we move into the 5 and 6 gigahertz band, but it’s still worth being aware of. The 2.4 gigahertz spectrum tends to be full of competing devices like portable phones, wireless video doorbells and just about any other wireless device around the home or office. Microwaves are an interference source as well, but the interesting thing about that is where it leads. If you extrapolate. Microwaves work by beaming lots of 2.4 gigahertz waves into your food but not just into your food, into the water in your food. 2.4 gigahertz radiation is absorbed by water molecules, which get excited, rub together, create friction and create heat which is what cooks your food. Yes, 2.4 gigahertz is absorbed by water so putting your Wi-Fi router next to your fish tank is a bad idea. Not to mention the problem if the tank leaks.

The other interesting thing is that humans are roughly 60 to 70% water. Now to be sure, the wi-fi is not powerful enough to cook you, so don’t panic about that, but the waves are absorbed by your body and quite a bit by a group of people. So it’s not a great idea to put your wi-fi router where large groups of people will congregate. It also means that if you’re sitting with your back to the router and your laptop in front of you, it’s quite likely that your body is screening the wi-fi out and changing the location of the wi-fi or the orientation of your desk and how you sit might be enough to turn a poor signal into an ok signal.

If that’s not enough, there is some extra hardware that might be a good solution for you. A Wi-Fi repeater is a device that’s plugged into a powerpoint, usually just where your Wi-Fi is starting to fade out. It receives the Wi-Fi and then broadcasts it back out, boosting the signal. These do tend to be quite directional, and so it can be a bit difficult if your powerpoint isn’t pointing in the right direction though you may be able to fix that with the short extension lead.

Some of them can be had on eBay really cheap. I bought this one for about 7 dollars, 10 years ago. So it’s old and only supports 802.11n or wi-fi 4, but for the price at the time, it was perfect. It plugs into the powerpoint, and off you go. There are better ones available with great antennas and mounting options and support for 802.11 ac or wi-fi 5. for under about 70 Australian dollars. They also often have a (wired) network point so that you can cable them directly back to the router if that works better.

Another option is an old router. If you have one lying around or buy one on eBay or the local Facebook marketplace for probably less than ten dollars, you should then be able to configure it the way you need and point it into the dark recesses of the wi-fi dead spot and cable it back to the router to complete your setup.

Our old cable modem had less than ideal wi-fi and really couldn’t be relocated easily due to the heavy cable, so I hooked up this other old router, mounted it high up on the wall in clear air and was able to broadcast wi-fi right to the far side of the house. It’s only wi-fi 4, so it can’t compete with the wi-fi 5 in the new router, but it’s still there for the time being.

So there you have some free and inexpensive options for lighting up the dead wi-fi spots in your home or office.

Question of the day, do you have wi-fi dead spots? Which of these options do you think might be best to fix your problem? Let me know in the comments down below and if you think the video was useful, give me a thumbs up.

The Tech Doctor exists to help you become your own technician, learn about the technology, protect yourself from the bad guys and fix it when it breaks. T

Thank you so much for watching. have a great day, and I’ll see you on the next episode.

Bye

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Hey there do-it-yourself technicians. Are you confused by all of the ports and plugs that are available on your new laptop or desktop?

In this video, we’ll go through more than a dozen of the most common connectors on laptops and desktops and let you know what they’re for.

So you’ve got a new device and you’re not sure what all of the sockets on the side or the back do. Well, here’s a step-by-step run-through of all those different plugs and what you might use them for.

The most common is USB. We all recognize a USB-A socket and the plethora of devices that we can plug into it. we actually have a full episode on USB and what the various colours sockets and speeds are and that’s linked up here.

USB-C is the newest and fastest incarnation of the USB family and notable for also being the power connector on many laptops.

The power connector is a tricky one if it’s not USB-C. It could look like just about anything. There’s rectangle ones and round ones and probably even some square ones out there. It’s hard to show you them all, but I do have this collection of plugs up here that came with one of the aftermarket chargers that I bought that will charge multiple different devices, and that’s just some of them. A lot of the newer ones are getting smaller and smaller as they cope with thinner and thinner laptops.

On the video side, we have HDMI, mini HDMI and micro HDMI. A HDMI connector is probably familiar to anyone who’s plugged in a TV in the last 10 years. Mini and micro are less common. The only mini HDMI connector that I have is on this camera that is recording this episode, but I’m sure they will become more and more common, particularly as laptops get thinner and thinner. Many desktop video cards will also have HDMI ports. One other great feature of HDMI is that it can also carry audio such as you would into your TV and use the TV’s internal speakers. You can do the same from your laptop or desktop. It can carry audio to whatever is displaying the video as well.

VGA and DVI ports are relatively unusual these days on a laptop but still quite common on desktops. DVI less, so the main reason for this is the plugs are simply too big to fit on a laptop. Again the VGA connector is 15 pins arranged in three rows, usually with a blue backing which you plug in a blue-headed cable. The DVI connector is both an analog and a digital connector and uses up to 29 pins to carry the information in some of its various forms. The DisplayPort connector has this very distinctive L-shape internal and, like DVI and VGA, carry video only.

The mini Display Port connector, also known as Thunderbolt, is another multi-function interface, in many ways the precursor to USB-C. It can carry video, power and also be used for network and storage, with up to six devices daisy-chained per port.

SD Card and micro SD Card readers are common on laptops these days and in desktops, often combined with other types of cards like MMC and XD cards, usually in an array that looks like this. You can also buy USB-A and USB-C card readers that will plug into laptops or desktops alike.

Ethernet ports are becoming less and less common in laptops as they get thinner and thinner, but they’re still ubiquitous on desktop machines. My Lenovo Yoga L390 has a dedicated mini rj45 connector for networking because it’s just too thin to hold a standard rj45, but this requires an optional dongle. Honestly, I would much prefer if they’ve taken that out and put in another USB-C connector. When I need wired ethernet, I plug in either a USB-A or a USB-C to ethernet adapter and use that. There’s no way I can justify the extra plug that won’t be useful on any other laptop.
Headphones and microphones. Sometimes these are separate ports, sometimes they’re together, and it can get a little bit confusing when you’re trying to plug either a headset or a microphone or headphones in. If it’s just the single port, It’s almost always a headset and will take something similar to what you might use on a mobile phone. If there are two ports, then you can simply plug a microphone into one and headphones into the other, and they’ll usually be labelled for that.

E-SATA is an external version of the SATA connection that is used inside the computer for storage devices. Not very common these days because USB is just fast enough for those sorts of connections and much more widely available. Some devices actually combine an e-SATA and a USB port into one, which is a really nifty use of the technology and the space.

The PCI-Express card slot is just about gone for good. I would say it was used to add ethernet, wi-fi, card readers, 4g connection, those sorts of things in laptops before they were built-in, and these days USB-C does basically exactly the same job for anything that needs it. It’s certainly fast enough to transfer data for just about anything.

The last port that actually confuses some people is known as the Kensington lock. This is designed to plug in a lock, either a key lock or a combination lock that you then anchor to the desk that your computer is on. This is basically just to make it more theft-proof. they won’t stop a determined thief, but they will provide a visual cue and slow down any would-be thieves.

Question of the day. Did you know all of those ports? Is there some that I missed? Let me know in the comments down below and while you’re there, leave a thumbs up if this was useful for you.

The Tech Doctor exists to help you become your own technician, Learn about the technology, Protect yourself from the bad guys and Repair it if it breaks.

Thank you so much for watching, and I’ll see you on the next episode. Have a great day.