I am using my neighbors WiFi, which I can only catch in my balcony. He stays above me, but diagonally opposite, so the source is quite away. Any way I can amplify the WiFi strength? So I need the source to be around in order to amplify?
Why not consider putting a good extender placed near your balcony?
I use one at my Dad's house (next door to mine) so that I can access my wifi. Our houses are brick, and in spite of that, the extender I got does a pretty good job. I've tried various extenders in the past few years, and they were all pretty flaky, but the latest generation of extenders seems to perform much better than older ones.
I'm using the Wirecutter's current favorite, the TP-Link RE450. Having said that, the RE450 was recently found to be spamming NTP servers with an excessive amount of requests.
You could buy a cheap TP-Link Router with a USB-Port and LEDE/OpenWRT support, add a second wifi interface (usb dongle) and then use your neighbors wifi as WAN connection.
Good usb dongles are:
1. Alfa AWUS036NHA – $28.97
2. TP-LINK TP-WN722N OR TP-WN722NC $15.99
Benefits:
have "your" wifi on a separate channel, you have your own subnet, firewalled (nat) from your neighbor's net.
I second ce4's suggestion. LEDE/OpenWRT are open source projects of linux based firmwares that run on embedded devices. Tangentally, I've used OpenWRT in combination with: a cheap router, a USB dongle as a second wifi interface, a 4G/LTE hotspot and a package called MWAN3 (previously MultiWAN) to configure a cheap and reliable setup for automated WAN failover (backup internet) and for circumventing restrictions of 4G/LTE hotspot devices.
Saw a vid on youtube where a guy uses a metal kitchen strainer as a dish antenna for his laptop wifi out in the middle of farm field. The 'available networks' list shrinks and grows as he points it in various directions.
Use a Ubiquiti Nanostation directional antenna. These things are quite powerful and relatively cheap. Have used them before to link two sites ~20m apart.
Thirded. I had some Meraki (MR32 and MR18) equipment in my house and spent years mucking with the settings and always felt like something was wrong. My AP-AC-PRO Ubiquiti APs that replaced them have astoundingly better range and throughput. IMO the Meraki APs are worse than consumer gear in terms of range.
The repeater suggestion is exactly what I did at university. There was a network I could _just_ pick up most of the time on my laptop that I wanted to use (run by the central university rather than my college so it had fewer usage limits). Putting a DD-WRT router by my window which connected to it as a client, then shared the connection over Ethernet, got me a rock solid connection.
It also lets you put your devices on their own subnet/NAT, which is nice from a security perspective (I've do this at home quite a lot - re-purposed router connects the main network on 2.4GHz and treats it as a WAN, then provides its own connections on 5GHz).
I think the source needs to be strong. I'm currently using a wifi extender and noticed the speed isn't good when I move the extender to a room further from the source.
