I can still remember when I first encountered wireless networking. It was actually before I'd ever plugged an Ethernet cable in. Two cheap $20 WiFi adaptors and an ad-hoc network later and my brother and I were gaming. And it wasn't until a further six months after that I discovered the joys of getting your internet connection through a wireless network.
Technically I discovered the joys of getting SOMEONE ELSE'S internet connection. Went down on holiday to a rented cottage and happened to turn on my laptop while I was there. Windows was set to immediately join an open network and found itself an internet connection. In the days where all I had was dial up? Even a poor wireless connection to a router with broadband was a whole new species.
When I got back home I immediately set about looking for a wireless network with such speeds. And I found one.
Problem was the signal was too poor to get in the house unless I hung the laptop outside the window (not a great plan in a city where it rains most of the time). And this is where I learned how to boost your wifi signal. Not from college or on the job. As a kid who wanted to play games with a better internet speed.
Well, it worked I guess.
So the first thing I had to do was get a wireless repeater to get the signal in the first place. It acts as a middle man basically taking the original signal wirelessly then creating a new wireless network itself. So it connects to the hotels router from the window and I connect to the repeater. $50 when I was younger wasn't cheap but for the sake of free internet 24/7 I was all for it.
That was 100% the biggest step. Nothing else I could of done to get the signal around the house (short of running a very long cable into the hotel and asking them to plug it in for me). But the signal was still spotty. You could tell during the day when interference was higher the signal would start dropping.
So the next step was to look at the wireless world around me. There are plenty of free tools for this but basically all I had to do was look around and the channels the other networks in my area were using. This is before you also had the option of frequency on your router and I just had to look for a quiet channel.
Now while the wireless router in the hotel was on a default login - I didn't feel right about changing it even though it would of helped their signal. So I left the original network on their channel but the network my WiFi repeater was creating moved away from the busier range.
Next step was elevation. Originally I had the repeater sitting behind a thick sandstone wall on the window sill. It meant not only was the wall blocking it but everything waist level in the house. So I moved it around the wall and elevated it up about 6 feet. It got a better connection to the hotel here and the signal was a lot stronger around the house itself after that.
Last step can get a bit technical depending on how far you take it. These days it is easy to buy directional antennas for an adaptor or repeater. But back then? Even if I had the money for that kind of stuff I certainly didn't have the selection we do now.
So we built a cantenna for the wifi card. Basically meant to boost the direction of the signal purely towards the repeater. That really helped and the signal was strong enough by this point but the tinkerer in me came out to play. Next I removed the original antenna from the wireless repeater itself and soldered on a crappy directional one. I think it cost me maybe $10 and a rough soldering job but I never had a problem with the connection again.
You might think this was a lot of work. And maybe it was at the time (although technology does a lot of this work for us now) but this lasted at least a year before I finally got my own wireless network in the house.