DIY mobile internet amplifier

Geek mind and science at work.

One day while kick-starting startup in Spain our internet disappeared. After trying all we could think of we decided to get mobile prepaid card with unlimited internet and share it by creating wi-fi hotspot from one of our smartphones. We bought card from local provider, it’s signal was not that good at our villa but it was the only provider offering unlimited mobile internet with prepaid card. When we got back to villa we discovered that we can not get any internet with such mobile signal. There was only one place (and particular position of phone) where we could get ping less than 300 ms, download around 0.5 Mb/s and upload around 0.2 Mb/s. Plus it was really unstable with lots of packet losses. For 9 internet surfers such speed is same as no internet at all.

So we started looking for ways to amplify mobile signal.

We become really creative when left without internet. First amplifier idea was from Andrius — he started using cooking pot. Here is me trying out his idea:

Results were not much better. And then Emilis joked — “Let’s buy a lot of chocolate and use its foil to cover inside of sunshade umbrella and use that as antenna”. That is geek’s mind trying to get back online at any cost.

Anyway, I knew that we had cooking foil in the kitchen. What began as a joke started to become reality.

We didn't really believe such a thing would work until it was in place and we tried to run speed test being near it:

After trying out different positions of umbrella and phone

we got pretty stable and decent internet. At least for countryside Spain.

So all you need to build mobile signal amplifier is: big umbrella, cooking foil and duct tape:

And don’t forget to strap your antenna (we did forget and it went swimming in the pool once).