I'm www.netgate.com

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...

Cool seeing the link to Rob Frohne, he was one of my outstanding professors.

To make any consistent results, you need to couple to the RF ouput/input connectors. Nothing you attach to the exterior is going to do what you want - it will change some aspect of the signal, but so does any environmental aspect, including the pipe in the wall next to you.

From my research it is snake oil mostly. The only ones I had any noticeable difference - are cantennas, both home made and production made. The rest - no noticeable difference.

I'd add satellite dishes and woks to the list of things that work pretty well.

Ubiquiti (http://ubnt.com) makes some great wi-fi equipment. One of the pico or nanostation units set to client/station/bridge mode should end any troubles you have. They are incredibly low priced.

I'll second that on http://cantenna.com - Jason and the team there have been providing an excellent source of these antenna's for almost a decade. (I can vouch for the integrity of the product because we were one of the biggest consumers of their product in the day on my site http://netstumbler.com)

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.