At the end of July, I had to leave my previous lodgings in Ornex and move to Genève proper, where I now inhabit an apartement on the fifth floor of la Cité Universitaire with two colleagues. The move caught us ill-prepared in a number of crucial ways, and so the first evening went rather depressingly – the kitchen proved to be spacious, but rather empty (Three spoons, three forks, three butter knives, three plates, three glasses, three cups. One pan, one pot.), and so the first dinner went badly (our only source of salt being a can of anchovis).

Much worse, it turns out that although there is wireless internet avaiable, the charges for short stays are rather steep – two weeks would have been 70 CHF for an unexplained amount of connectivity, and probably limited to one PC. The other available WLAN is provided by the university, but they use MAC filters and a HTTPS secured login form to keep out guests. While pondering this depressing state of things, we chanced upon a third source of network connectivity, named ‘((o)) ville de geneve’ – which turns out to be Genève’s municipal WLAN, available in select spots around the city. It seems that our location was high enough to get stray signal from a stadium a couple of hundred meters away. Sadly, the connection was weak and required users to sit in exactly the right spot in our kitchen’s window bay or lean out of the window with the laptop. To rectify this untenable situation, we semi-seriously acquired a can of Pringles on our Friday shopping trip, and I went to town today in search of a PCMCIA card with an external antenna plug. It was impossible to obtain such a thing, but while browsing available WLAN adapters, I got the much better idea to simply take a USB adapter and build it directly into the antenna… I hopped over to the local Starbucks and verified that of course there was nothing original to that idea and people had done it before all over the Internets, using materials like a strainer, wok lids or fire extinguishers.

I bought a D-Link DWL-G122 USB plug and brought it home. Initially, we hoped to get enough signal advantage from just hanging the USB plug out of the window by its cable, but apparently its antenna is so much smaller that it compensated for the better reception. Some interesting results from that: reflection DOES make a difference – holding the adapter in front of a closed metal shutter or mounting it in our cooking pan definitely increased the signal strength. None of these methods were really practicable, though, so we decided to go the classical Yagi route. Eating the Pringles was pretty hard, but the results are worth it… We now have comfortable signal strength and the network is reexported around the entire apartment via the internal WLAN card in the attached computer, and the setup is even quite stable thanks to the fact that one of my roommates lent his tripod to our noble enterprise.

(Yes, the USB adapter and the Pringles cost just as much as just buying the Internet access would have, but would that have been as much fun?)

Update: On revisiting Edificom’s pricing information, I see that we actually managed to save some money (70 vs 115 CHF) AND gained the fun. Win!