Review: 9DBi Wireless Router Antenna

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I managed to dig out some money lately to buy a few gadgets and bits of kit, so you’ll probably see a few reviews on various items in the next few days. But first of all, I’ve got this 9DBi wireless router antenna.

I bought it simply because the little antenna that came with my D-Link DSL-2640B doesn’t quite cut it in my house. For some reason, the signal it emits just isn’t powerful enough to cover the whole of my small house, so I decided it was time for an upgrade.

After a quick search around on eBay, I found this. It is really a pretty good deal at just £6.99 so if you are having signal problems, I suggest you get one.

Most routers generally come with either built in antennas or removable ones. You are lucky if you have a removable one, because you can upgrade it. Sadly, built in antennas aren’t replaceable so you’ll just have to live with the poor signal range or just buy a new router.

If you do have a removable antenna on your router, you’ll be glad to know that you can use a wide range of different antennas. The most common type of antenna that is fitted to most routers by default is omnidirectional. This means that they broadcast in all directions – great if your router is in the center of your house but not so great if its in the corner of the house since a good 30-40% of your wireless power will be wasted going through the wall out of your house. You can get antennas that point in one direction, but these are less common and more expensive. Unless you’re really desperate, I’d suggest you stick to omnidirectional.

Another thing you’ll need to understand is the rating of the antenna. Most routers come with an antenna of about 3-5DBi which is fine for a small modern house. However you can get antennas up to about 9DBi which are much more powerful. Bare in mind they are much bigger than 3DBi antennas and you won’t be impressed if you want don’t like the look of your gadgets. F0r example, the one I now have (see eBay link above) is 37.5cm high so it will be quite hard to hide.

They are definitely worth the upgrade though. I am very impressed with mine, as the signal range is much better and I get much fewer disconnections which is good. The only thing I’m a little puzzled about is that my router says to lower the transmit power of the router if I install a high gain antenna – but why should I, doesn’t that just defeat the point of buying a more powerful antenna? Little odd.

Anyway, so yes, if you do experience wireless signal issues try getting a new antenna. Check that you can replace your antenna before you buy one for obvious reasons. If you can, you might find this makes a big difference.

Why should we pay for major iPod updates?

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Now I am the proud owner of my iPod Touch, I try to keep up with the news to do with it. And the biggest thing that springs into mind at the moment is the upcoming 3.0 update for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The only thing that does annoy me a little is the fact that iPhone users will get the update absolutely free and us iPod Touch users will have to pay about 10$ (about £6.60 at time of writing) for it.

Now I know that there are some cool updates in it (bluetooth being enabled as a feature being just one of them) but compared to other popular mobile devices, Apple are just trying to drain us of our cash.

For example,  the PSP is a similar mobile device (not physically, but in terms of hardware) – and it’s cheaper to purchase plus all those updates Sony have provided in the past haven’t cost a penny.

There are ways to get round paying for the iPod update, but I don’t really want to go breaking the law and certainly don’t want to encourage it.

I think no matter whether they make us pay for it or not I will go and get it, mainly because it’s too much to miss out on, but it does seem like Apple just want to drain that little bit more out of us. Especially in these credit crunch times, most people are trying to save the pennies and not go pouring them into Steve Job’s pocket for a small update.

So yes – small rant there – but come on Apple, I can think of countless companies that don’t charge for updates to mobile devices and I don’t think it’s 100% fair.

Tiscali to be bought by Carphone Warehouse

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It was announced this morning that Tiscali, a large internet service provider that supplies 1.76 million people with internet, is about to be sold to the Carphone Warehouse for in excess of £236 million.

The Carphone Warehouse hopes to merge Tiscali into it’s current broadband service within the next 2 years, however they have said that Tiscali email addresses will be spared.

Tiscali has recently lost customers as they seek other broadband companies with better customer service.

This is not the first time Tiscali have been on the market. In fact, they’ve been on the market for over a year now, and they’ve had talks with Sky and Vodafone although both potential deals fell through.

Tiscali is currently suffering with the large amount of debts it is currently in.

When the Carphone Warehouse and Tiscali are merged together, the Carphone Warehouse will supposedly have more than 4.25 million broadband subscribers and that will place it 2nd in the broadband market.

I’m currently using Tiscali as one of my ISPs and to be quite honest the longer the wait for them to merge, the better. I am quite happy with Tiscali’s current internet plan and I hope that their current plan isn’t overwritten. Their current 8MB broadband is really decent value, especially baring in mind that their fair usage policy states that they won’t get at you for your usage unless your nearing 100GBs per month in bandwidth – and that’s tonnes. TalkTalk’s similar current plan has a 40GB usage and costs £17.74 per month, however Tiscali’s up to 100GB usage plan costs just £14.99.

So the longer the better in my opinion. But that’s where Tiscali is heading anyway.

Three UK announces unlimited Skype for everyone, forever

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Three UK mobile announced on 1st May 2009 that it was editing its usage policy of Skype on user’s mobiles. From now on, all users of Three mobiles will receive unlimited usage on Skype no matter whether you top up or not. So basically that means that users can now have free calls to anybody in the world, as long as they are on Skype.

The plan used to be that Pay As You Go customers had make a £5 top up once every three months to get Skype calls, and Pay Monthly customers had to have an internet plan. From now on, as long as you are on a 3 mobile you will get free Skype calls anytime, to anyone (on Skype).

I am glad that Three are finally using VoIP to a new level, and hopefully this will cause other mobile operators to follow on.

Windows 7 Release Candidate now available to public!

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Yep, it’s out. Anybody can now download it and install it for free. It will be usable until March 1st 2010, and Microsoft want as many people as possible to try it.

You can grab a copy here – but as usual be aware Microsoft servers are overloaded again so it will probably take a while to get through.

I’ll be posting a review of it in a few days when I’ve done some testing of it. Enjoy 🙂