If you have ever heard of the Windsurfer parabola cutouts to make a parabola using some card stock and aluminum foil. It's supposed to focus wifi signals. People claim up to 10 dB increase in signal. I am unsure it has done anything and my skepticism comes from the fact that it's really hard to handle aluminum foil without crinkling it up and creating about 400 different surfaces on the newly formed parabola.
I haven't seen it do much yet but my wireless signal fluctuates a lot and has very poor quality using the Linksys WRT54G router and Belkin Wireless G card. Usually around 20% signal quality and drops down to 8% sometimes.
The confusion comes when I saw some pictures of completed windsurfers that didn't look like mine. For example: http://img63.imageshack.us/img63/369...dsurferuf0.jpg
This one has the foil on the opposite side which to me seems counterintuitive because there is no parabola being formed. In this video on youtube these guys built theirs similar to mine. It looks like they just bought card stock that came with the reflective surface rather than put aluminum foil on it because it's hardly crinkled.
Along with this I was curious to see if anyone can help me better my wireless signal (the wireless was forced on me by my parents because they don't feel like running a cable downstairs). We've gotten rid of the our phone that operates at 2.4 GHz and I can't think of any other sources of interference. The router is upstairs and I am downstairs but altogether my computer and it aren't too far apart. What should I do?