I’ve just gained another half megabit on my O2 mobile broadband dongle.
I use it for Internet connectivity at home at the moment, and after reading about people having a lot of success using saucepans as reflective dishes I thought I’d make my own.
A while ago, I bought a pot of Polymorph. This stuff is a maker’s dream - it comes in small pellets, melts to a pliable, mouldable, tearable state at 62 Celsius and then sets into nylon-hard and slightly flexible (when thin) or rock solid (when thick) white plastic. This process can be repeated over and over again. When in its mouldable state, it sticks extremely strongly to other mouldable pieces (ie, itself) and reasonably strongly to other set pieces.
I melted the Polymorph and tore a small piece off. The remaining large chunk I flattened out on a plate, then let set over a bowl. This wasn’t ideal, as it’s not perfectly parabolic, but for my purposes it worked.
I used the remaining pieces to form three ‘legs’ to allow the USB cable through. My legs weren’t long enough, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I covered the inside with aluminium foil as smoothly as possible and cut holes in the foil and the plastic very slightly smaller than the USB dongle, so that the pliability of the plastic would hold it in place.
Here’s the finished setup:
And from the front:
I was getting ~100kBytes/sec before, and now I’m seeing ~160kBytes/sec. Rotating the dish while watching the download speed gave me the best direction for it - something that I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t forced to lay it on its side by the short legs :)
If you make this, there are two ways you can make it better:
- Make it bigger. Bigger dish means better signal.
- Make it more perfectly parabolic. The most important bit is the mould you use for the plastic itself, but the imperfections in the foil will also make a difference.
Hope this is of use to someone, somewhere. Good luck if you try to build it - let me know!
