What’s killing your Wi-Fi? Wrapping your house in tin foil

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

On the cover of this month’s magazine (on sale today) we ask: what’s killing your Wi-Fi? Among the many answers – and solutions – you’ll find in our cover feature is one supplied by our Real World wireless expert, Paul Ockenden.

“Modern homes constructed largely of plaster board also use signal-bouncing foil coating in bathrooms and kitchens,” Paul offers as one possible reason for erratic Wi-Fi reception.

Judging by a walk past a local housing development, it’s not only kitchens and bathrooms that are being turned into giant Faraday cages – it’s the whole house.

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iPhone App of the Week: TuneIn Radio

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

As anyone who’s ever desperately tried to tune in to Radio Five for the football commentary will testify, the iPhone doesn’t do radio. Not only does it not have an FM tuner, but any attempts to tune in to live BBC streams via their respective websites pings you straight to the iPlayer: where’s there no live stream option.

Step forward TuneIn Radio, a simply magnificent little app that not only delivers the BBC channels over your 3G/Wi-Fi data connection, but pretty much any radio station on the planet (Padare Radio Zimbabwe, anyone?).

TuneIn Radio is far more than a digital tuner, although the fuss free manner in which it organises its list of channels should serve as a lesson to makers of internet radios everywhere. Not only does it list stations, but also the show and even the individual song that’s currently playing (providing the station coughs up the relevant data, which many of the big boys do).

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Bouncing messages off the moon

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Radio nerds celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landings this week by bouncing radio waves off the moon. It’s a five second round-trip, even for a radio wave, so the conversations were rather stilted. But what an interesting tribute it was.

Will other technological milestones be celebrated in similar ways, I wonder?

Will the 40th anniversary of the internet’s creation be honoured by people bouncing emails off of Tim Berners-Lee’s laptop? Will we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the GSM network by routing SMS messages through Friedhelm Hillebrand’s mobile?

No, probably not.

Blik becomes iBlik

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

I played with the Blik RadioStation a while back, and I must admit that I was thoroughly impressed. It was the first combined DAB, FM and Wi-Fi radio I’d seen, and the sound quality was good enough to easily bag it a recommended award.

Not content to rest on its laurels, though, Blik has thrown another audio source in to its new model. Now you get three flavours of radio and an iPod dock. In the time-honoured tradition of iPod accessories, the model name has been preceded with a meaningless “i”, to become the iBlik.

None of us here in the labs have an iPod, so it’s my duty to admit that the above image is a cunning mock-up. We wouldn’t want to deceive you here at Pro. We’ll test it out and get back to you, but if the dock’s sound quality can match that of the radio inputs then it has nothing to worry about.