Could someone here recommend a commercial wifi signal enhancer for use with a laptop that they've had good results with? (It need not have a directional antenna as in the original article.)
Whenever I've googled the commercial products, I feel like the market is rife with snake oil. I'd be much happier with a recommendation from someone on HN.
The closest thing (though it's completely different) to what is covered in the article is here: http://store.netgate.com/24-GHz-9-dBi-Linear-Feed-Antenna-N-...
The cantennas is really a waveguide. As such, it has no gain. What is being measured is the increase in SNR, due to a lowered noise floor. (Edit: to be completely fair, the antenna raises the signal and noise level.)
This one has increased gain:
http://people.wallawalla.edu/%7ERob.Frohne/Airport/Primestar...
I assume that the interest in this is back because of Marius Milner the Google employee who built the Netstumbler software http://www.netstumbler.com / http://stumbler.net is the suspected engineer who wrote the Google software that has been in the news about the mapping of access points by Google streets cars.