Have you ever been stuck outside of the fixed range of your WiFi signal and wondered what to do? There’s a cheap, easy, and effective solution: The Cantenna! Not only will it score you major geek cred, it’ll solve your issue for pennies on the dollar.

To wit, I was recently stuck in just such a situation. My home network was switched to wireless, and I had just acquired a Wii. Unfortunately our new WiFi router didn’t have the power to ship a signal to my notebook or the Wii, so what was I to do?

After sitting down in the kitchen and researching for a bit I figured I had three options:

The first was to buy a signal booster to hook into the router. This was quickly ruled out, however, as my mother has a rather Luddite approach to technology.

My second option was to buy a wireless repeater. Not only was that extremely expensive, but it would make things easy, and we all know what happens when a project looks easy

By process of elimination, I was whittled down to the cantenna. It sounded fun, different and best of all, cheap to do.

But how to go about it? This required more research. I scoured the series of tubes that is the internet and came across a simple, bare-bones site that explained it plainly. The cantenna is extremely effective with only a small list of parts:

The Parts

• A metal can. Soup and Pringles cans work best.
• An N-female chassis mount connector .
• A pigtail connector cord. Make sure that the type you buy matches your WiFi card’s connector.
• A few small nuts and bolts.
• A small length of copper wire.
• Soldering equipment.