Laptop Wi-Fi Booster

Do you find it hard to connect with a Wi-Fi network on your laptop? Then installing a laptop Wi-Fi signal booster can help you out. The quality of Wi-Fi signal you receive on your laptop is dependent on the distance of your laptop, from the source of the signal, which is a wireless router. There are many ways you can boost the reception of Wi-Fi signals. You could either improve the range of your wireless router, using a wireless signal booster or make modifications on the end of the laptop, with a laptop Wi-Fi booster. In this Buzzle article, we discuss how Wi-Fi signal boosters for laptop computers work and present you with a list of laptop Wi-Fi booster you could use.

To understand how laptop Wi-Fi booster antennas work, you need to know a bit about how Wi-Fi networks work in general. The wireless router is the central device in any wireless network, which provide wireless Internet access to laptops, desktops and other devices which are connected with it through a radio link. Every Wi-Fi enabled device, including your laptop has a wireless adapter that receives the radio carrier signal from the router and transmits data back to it. Being a radio link, the Wi-Fi signal damps out with distance. To enhance the signal, you could install a wireless signal booster antenna at the router or at the laptop or desktop computer.

How Does a Laptop Wi-Fi Booster Work?

The working of a Wi-Fi booster is simple enough to understand, if you know how radio antennas work. Antennas are basically metal conductors that are designed to receive signals from a specific bandwidth of radio waves. They are typically connected to your laptop via a special antenna jack connection and act as range extenders for your laptop's Wi-Fi adapter. When you install such a Wi-Fi booster antenna, it increases the reception range of the internal Wi-Fi card and provides you with a stronger signal, boosting the upload and download speeds overall.

While choosing a signal boosters for Wi-Fi enabled laptops, there are certain features that you need to know about. Check out the gain provided by the antenna and its operating frequency range. The range should match the transmission frequency of wireless routers and the gain should be as high as possible, to provide strong signal reception. Check out the kind of connectors required to install the antenna on your laptop. They need to be checked for compatibility. There are many do it yourself kits available on the Internet, which can be used to boost the Wi-Fi signal reception on your laptop. You will find plenty of electronics blogs on the Internet explaining the construction of laptop Wi-Fi booster antennas, which you could check out.

Laptop Wi-Fi Booster Antennas

Let us see what are the best readymade laptop Wi-Fi signal boosters you could use. One of the widely used products for the purpose is the RadioLabs Wireless Laptop Antenna for 802.11 wireless networking standard based networks. It costs around $29.95 and can only be used with an external Wi-Fi card that can be installed on any laptop or desktop computer. RadioLabs also supplies Wi-Fi signal boosters for wireless routers, which you could check out on their official website.

Another option is going for Wireless USB adapters which come with attached booster antennas, that can provide better Wi-Fi reception for your laptop computer. There are many such adapters manufactured by Belkin, Alfa, Netgear and Samsung. They can enhance the Wi-Fi reception substantially on old laptops.

These are some of the laptop Wi-Fi boosters you could purchase. As discussed before there is a lot of information about do-it-yourself Wi-Fi signal booster antenna construction, which you could check out, if you are an electronics enthusiast who loves to tinker with such things.