BERRY DIGITAL SOLUTIONS LLC
  • Home
  • Our Story
  • What We Do
    • Website Development
    • Social Media Services
    • Paid Advertising
    • Content Creation
  • Blog
  • Contact Us
Berry Digital Solutions Blog Team

Best Place to Put Your Router Based on Physics

3/26/2015

Comments

 

I’ve encountered router issues quite a few times on my travels in Logan and Champaign County, so I found this article from mashable.com to help you identify the best place in your house to locate your router.

Original post located here: http://mashable.com/2015/03/25/electromagnetic-radiation-router/

Electromagnetic radiation — it might sound like something that you'd be better off avoiding, but electromagnetic waves of various kinds underpin our senses and how we interact with the world — from the light emissions through which your eyes perceive these words, to the microwaves that carry the Wi-Fi signal to your laptop or phone on which you're reading it.

More or less every form of modern communication is carried by electromagnetic waves. They whisk through the antenna on your car, travel through walls whenever you need to make a phone call inside, yet also inexplicably reflect from seemingly nothing in the Earth's upper atmosphere.

This happens because the atmosphere becomes a plasma at high altitudes — a state of matter where atoms split apart and electrons are no longer bound to their parent nuclei. Plasmas have interesting properties, as they react very strongly to electromagnetic fields. In this case usefully: at low enough frequencies it becomes possible to bounce radio signals around the world, extending their range.

It's the interesting interactions between high-powered electromagnetic waves and plasmas that my research group and I study. The most intense electromagnetic waves in the world are found in the form of high-power laser pulses. The UK hosts some of the most powerful laser systems in rural Oxfordshire, and the same idea of using electromagnetic waves to accelerate particles is used at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN.

It's all in the maths We can accurately predict the interactions of intense electromagnetic waves and plasmas, as the underlying physical processes are governed by Maxwell's equations — one of the triumphs of 19th century physics that united electric and magnetic fields and demonstrated that light is a form of electromagnetic wave.

Solving Maxwell's equations by hand can be tortuous, but it transpires that a clever algorithminvented in the 1960s and rediscovered since makes the exercise relatively simple given a sufficiently powerful computer.

Armed with the knowledge of Maxwell's equations and how to solve them, I recently turned my attention to a much simpler but more widespread problem, that of how to simulate and therefore improve the Wi-Fi reception in my flat. While "sufficiently powerful" in an academic sense often means supercomputers with tens of thousands of processors running in parallel, in this case, the sufficiently powerful computer required to run the program turned out to be a smartphone.

For this trick you will need one Maxwell The electromagnetic radiation emanating from the antenna in your wireless router is caused by a small current oscillating at 2.4GHz (2.4 billion times per second). In my model I introduced a current like this and allowed it to oscillate, and Maxwell's equations dictated how the resulting electromagnetic waves flow. By mapping in the actual locations of the walls in my flat, I was able to produce a map of the Wi-Fi signal strength which varied as I moved the virtual router.

The first lesson is clear, if obvious: Wi-Fi signals travels much more easily through free space than walls, so the ideal router position has line-of-sight to where you'll be using it.

Sometimes it appears that the waves have stopped changing, and instead flicker in the same places. This is the phenomenon of a standing wave, where Wi-Fi reflections overlap and cancel each other out. These dark spots on the map (or "not spots") indicate a low Wi-Fi signal, and are separated by several centimetres. Recently, a fellow enthusiast managed to map this phenomenon in three dimensions, as explained in this video.

So the second lesson is less obvious and more interesting: if reception is poor in a particular position, even a slight change of the router's position may produce significant improvement in signal strength, as any signal dark spots will also move.

101 uses for electromagnetic waves After publishing my findings I was struck by the number of people eager to perform simulations of their own. Ever eager to spread the gospel of electromagnetism, I bundled the simulation into an Android app to provide others with a simulated electromagnetic wave-based solution to a common modern problem: where's the best place for my Wi-Fi router?

Assuming few would be interested, I was surprised when news spread via social media and the several thousand copies of the app sold over the course of a few hours.

Sales have gradually dwindled but the message remains clear: not only are electromagnetic waves fascinating, mathematically elegant and supremely useful, they can make your life easier, your internet connection stronger, and even make you a bit of money too.
Comments
    Picture
    Contact Us!

    Archives

    February 2023
    December 2022
    August 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    July 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015

    Free Website Consultations

    Categories

    All
    Accessibility
    ADA Compliance
    Antivirus Protection
    Berry Digital Team
    Brand Development
    Client Spotlight
    Community Stories
    Computer Repair
    Cybersecurity
    Data Protection
    Digital Marketing
    #DreamTeam
    ECommerce Sites
    Facebook Marketing
    Google AdWords
    Graphic Design
    Happy Webiversary!
    IPads
    IT Support
    Local Advertising
    Networking
    Phone Repair
    Podcast
    SEO
    #ShopLocal
    Small Business Solutions
    Social Media
    Tablet Repair
    Videography
    Web Design
    Website Consultation
    Website Launch!
    Your Hometown Techs
    YouTube Advertising

    RSS Feed

    Local Website Design
Picture
Berry Digital Solutions LLC
​113 N. Main St.
​Urbana, OH 43078
937-404-1050
  • Home
  • Our Story
  • What We Do
    • Website Development
    • Social Media Services
    • Paid Advertising
    • Content Creation
  • Blog
  • Contact Us