So my Wifi on my PC only averages one bar, so my connection is usually pretty crappy. I bought one of those extended antenna things, but they only come with about 30cm of length, so it barely reach to the top of my PC case anyway. So I figured I'd just buy some more WiFi cable for maybe a few dollars, and found a 5m roll down at the shops...for $35 friggen dollars (US$30). I found one website selling 5m for $65! What I don't get is, what makes it so different from ethernet cable? Data is data, and whatever my PC sends though a WiFi cable I can send through an ethernet cable, so why is wifi antenna cables so much more expensive than ethernet cable?

I would guess because cat-5 cable is cheap and can handle heavy loss due to attenuation because it typically carries a fairly strong digital signal for no more than 100m. Not to mention that the connectors are much cheaper and molded from plastic. I'm not too hot with amateur radio but from what I understand it is fairly important that the receiver gets exactly what is coming through on the antenna for maximum accuracy, and the cables that HAMs use (which is pretty much exactly what you're buying, simply re-branded) are of fairly high quality.

You could always make your own cable. Apparently the popular "wifi antenna extension cables" use LMR-200 and SMA connectors (or whatever your wifi card uses). It turns out that the connectors are kind of hard to find. They are also somewhere around $5 each. Bulk LMR200 cable is even more difficult to find, it seems.

Either way you're probably going to cough up the money. It might not even help, given the state of access points. It might be easier to install some alternative firmware on your access point and boost the signal output a bit.

Edit:
Also just found some more information on the site with the connector information. Might be helpful for ya.

Awesome, thanks for that [smile]

You're also looking at frequencies around 2.4 Ghz in a WiFi cable, while Cat5e runs at about 300Mhz or so.

Before you start working on this you might want to do some reading. The lengths of the cables are a lot more important then you might think they would be.

theTroll

As others have implied, all data is not the same. The signaling method used by ethernet is completely different from that used by 802.11b/g and so different technology is required.

If possible, it would be better to either move your wireless access point or to buy another to extend your network.

Might want to try dosing up the room with some WiFi Speed Spray.