I relocated some of my networking gear and by doing that one of my pc’s found itself in a blind spot of the wireless network. I decided to try and see if I can extend the range of the usb wireless adapter it uses. I had a few antennas available but unfortunately the usb adapter didn’t have a connector. I decided to solder the antenna wire directly:
First I pried open the usb adapter and located the internal antenna pads. With this particular adapter the internal antenna is composed by the two spiral tracks at the right.
I cut the connector and stripped some of the insulation. After that I separated the core from the shielding and striped some of the core insulation
I soldered the middle lead to one of the antenna pads and the shielding wire to the metal housing.
I didn’t do any special tests but the change was that from dropping the connection every 2 minutes and running at 11Mbps now the adapter maintains a stable connection at 54Mbps