Andrew's WiFry antenna

You may be wondering what is this Chinese cookware that has an electronic device stuck in its middle. That electronic device, by the way, is a USB wifi adapter. A hole had been cut in the cookware so that the wifi adapter could poke through. Together, this is a homemade wifi booster and it's usually called a WiFry antenna.

I've heard of it before but never actually seen one. Now I have. Andrew was showing it to me when I was in KL last week for the Malaysian Chess Festival. We were at the far end of one of the halls at the MidValley Exhibition Centre. There was no direct wifi connectivity and his laptop could detect only two very weak signals from his work desk. But the moment he connected the Wifry to his laptop, the number of signals jumped to five. So the darn contraption actually worked! The signals were still very poor but at least, it detected signals that his laptop alone couldn't detect. I captured this second picture of Andrew hard at work without his WiFry turned on.

But there is a third photo as well. As I said, the signals were poor at the far end of the hall. Here's Andrew trying his best to capture some signals so that he could blog about the Festival. No luck!

You may think that the WiFry is funny or nerdy but there are people all over the world who swear by it. There have been claims that signals as far away as three to five kilometres could be received under ideal conditions.