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.

The picture above shows a new-build property being wrapped, from floorboards to rafters, in a material called Protect TF200 Thermo. A quick Google search for the material in question uncovers a detailed PDF explaining its many benefits, including “enhanced thermal protection” and “high tear strength”. What it doesn’t explain is the effect this material will have on radio signals such as Wi-Fi, mobile phone, or even digital radio and television reception. I sent an email to the company’s technical department two days ago, but have yet to receive a reply.

There’s one line in that PDF that should set alarm bells ringing however: “Protect TF200 Thermo provides a highly reflective yet permeable low emissivity layer.” I wouldn’t mind betting that highly reflective layer might well bounce your radio signals in an unpredictable fashion.

If owners of these brand-spanking new houses move in and discover they can’t get a reliable Wi-Fi signal in the garden, or that they can’t get a reliable 3G signal on their smartphone, that foil-like coating might well be the culprit. Conversely, it might even improve Wi-Fi signals internally by mirroring the signal.

The real issue is the new homeowners probably won’t know what’s causing their Wi-Fi woes. Unless they’ve looked at the plans in fine detail, or happened to pass by while the house was being constructed, that foil wraparound will be obscured from view by their exterior wall. Modern insulation regulations are all well and good, but is anyone even considering the effect this stuff has on radio reception?

So if you’ve moved into a modern home and are wondering what’s killing your Wi-Fi, the answer might well be the house itself. And short of tearing the walls down and starting again, there’s probably not a lot you can do about it.

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).

Hear a song you like, and you can press the little Record button wedged in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen to save the stream as a AAC+ file on your iPhone. Clearly wary of upsetting the record labels, there doesn’t appear to be any obvious way of exporting those recorded snippets, and in an extra sop to the music moguls, TuneIn also provides a link to buy the track that’s currently playing on iTunes, should you wish to buy a copy without Chris Evans et al gabbling all over it.

The recording facilities don’t stop there: entire shows can be set to record on timer, although you’ll need to leave the app running and plug the iPhone in to stop it running out of battery juice for long shows. Live broadcasts can be paused if the phone rings. And there’s also the option to turn your handset into a bedside clock radio by setting the alarm to wake you with your favourite station and the option to switch on a full-screen clock display.

The streams are rarely top quality – BBC Radio 2 pumps out at 48Kbits/sec, for example – but given that you’re often going to be reliant on the iffy 3G networks, it may be just as well that they’re not attempting to match CD levels. However, the option to switch to higher/lower quality streams is offered by a select few stations, and the app can also run in the background, allowing you to check your Twitter feed while listening to Jeremy Vine, for example.

For a measly £1.19, it’s hard to see how many more features could have been crammed into what is undoubtedly one of the most useful iPhone apps we’ve come across to date.

Want more iPhone apps? Try our 73 best iPhone Apps feature or our previous iPhone Apps of the Week.

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.

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.