A friend of mine here at Lehigh has been experimenting with wireless LAN adapters for years now. What interested him especially was trying to connect to access points outside the normal range of a standard wireless adapter, whether built-in or not. A standard wireless adapter is omni-directional, which means it can communicate with a wireless access point that is anywhere within a circle with around 300 feet radius (~90 meters). His experimenting started in his dorm room, where he tried to connect to an access points in a building in line of sight using a wireless adapter and a parabolic dish. The idea being, that a directional wireless adapter would have a significantly larger range than a standard omni-directional ones.

Years after those first experiments, he doesn’t have the parabolic dish anymore. Instead, he has now his own start-up that just brought an iPod-size directional wireless adapter to market, the Wi-Fire.

The Wi-Fire is a USB device and comes with drivers for Windows XP. For Vista RC1, you can download the drivers from Windows Update. Being a directional WLAN adapter, you can connect with it to access point 1,000 feet (~300 meters) or more away while it doesn’t require more power than a built-in omni-directional WLAN adapter. As you can see in the picture, it is rather small. It is sturdy though, as it has easily survived in my full laptop bag.

I personally use it in my favorite restaurant off-campus. With my tablet, I get shaky reception of my university’s WLAN there. With the Wi-Fire, I can eat while checking my emails, posting in the MS newsgroups and reading the news without having to repair my WLAN connection every 5 mins. I’ll be travelling in a few weeks, and I’m already curious to find out which free WLAN of some airport lounges I’ll be able to hop on to

If you aren’t a mobile user, but have an ISP nearby that provides WLAN (e.g. your university campus), but you are just outside the range of it, then the Wi-Fire might be what you need to get a good connection.

If you are interested to find out more about hField’s Wi-Fire, check it out now.