On 01/06/2014 21:27, Adrian wrote:
On Sun, 01 Jun 2014 21:12:21 +0100, Peter Crosland wrote:

Of course, on some units the antennae may just be pieces of plastic
added on at low cost to make the thing look more 'technological', like
set-top TV aerials.

I think routers have gone the other way these days - even where
external antennae would actually improve reception, internal look
"smoother" and thereby better.

Have you some empirical evidence to substantiate your claim that
external antennas are better?

Plenty to substantiate that they can, absolutely.

You'll note that I made no claim about the little stick things that come
as standard, but unscrewing those and putting a decent one on most
certainly can and does. As merely the most recent direct example, how
about the neighbour who swapped one of the stick things on his router for
a £15-delivered-from-Amazon TPLink antenna the other day, and can now
reliably get a connection from his garden office.

Or the business I used to work with, where we used a couple of similar
antennae to "bounce" a link between two offices in a serviced building
down the walls of an external alleyway, reliable enough for an office of
six or seven people to work with the servers that they couldn't otherwise
see.

Pity that isn't an option on routers with internal antennae.

Noted. But you are not comparing like with like. The "little stick
things" contain a metal antenna albeit a small one and are emphatically
not just for show as you suggest. The performance of a properly designed
patch antenna concealed within the casing will perform just as well as
one of those. Increasing the size of the antenna in the way you describe
will usually give performance gains.


--
Peter Crosland

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