Having gone on about how to extend the range of a wireless LAN using a high gain antenna, the need suddenly arose for the range of my own WiFi connection to be extended so I though I would purchase a 9dBi antenna to see what happened. Being a hardcore engineer, I wanted to try and see whether this antenna really delivered the gain over the original 2dBi antenna which it promised.

Antennas and laptop in hand, I used a programme called 'Netstumbler' to record the signal to noise of the reception of my WiFi connection over about a 1 hour period, changing between the standard 2dBi and the higher-gain 9dBi antenna about half way through. The first graph (below) shows the received signal strength over the period. The orange line is the rolling average over a 2 minute period. Without any further analysis, it is immediately apparent that the signal strength received when the 9dBi antenna is installed is higher than with the 2dBi antenna, indicating that it did have some gain as promised.



A quick calculation of the average over the 2 periods showed that the average signal to noise with the 2dBi antenna was 28.8dB, whereas the average signal to noise with the 9dBi antenna was 34.6dB, an increase of 5.8dB - not quite the 7dB increase that should in theory materialise, but not bad nonetheless. For the statisticians amongst you, the standard deviation in both cases was remarkably close at 3.96 and 3.92 dB for the 2 and 9 dBi antennas respectively, indicating that the signal was equally stable (despite the obvious variations) in both instances.



A further analysis of the results (above) shows the distribution of signal strengths produced by the 2 antenns. In this case it is easy to see that the signal produced by the 9dBi antenna (in orange) is consistantly and significantly better than that of the 2dBi antenna (in dark blue).

Whilst the experiment was less than scientific, taken at face value, it does suggest that the signal produced by the 9dBi antenna is a worthwhile improvement over the signal produced by the standard 2dBi antenna as supplied with most WiFi routers. The claims of a '3 to 4 times' increase in the range of coverage have not been tested - maybe I'll do that one day soon.