It's the same principle of al satellite dish and it works, but I'm 86% sure that mirrors won't affect wifi, so we're still not at 100% but getting there.

[–] pedro@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Depends on what frequency your "mirror" mirrors.

A traditional one reflects higher frequency of electromagnetic rays (visible light) than what you need for wifi (in the microwave frequencies)

[–] erez@programming.dev 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So you're saying the walls of an old microwave might do the trick

[–] Shard@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Jokes aside, anything made of metal will be a good enough reflector for most consumer use.

A coke can cut vertically in half makes a great parabolic relfector. Pepsi can maybe. Dr pepper not recommended.

[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

Actually yes.

Microwave ovens work by exciting water molecules using many hundreds of watts of ~2.45 GHz microwaves.

This specific frequency has a heating effect on water, so when you blast enough of it at food, which is often very saturated with water, it will heat up. The heat energy will transfer to the rest of the molecules in the food by contact.

That's the general idea at least.... I'm sure there's more interactions that happen, water is just the most significant, to my knowledge.

So the protection in the microwave is capable of reflecting (for the purposes of containment) 2.4Ghz microwaves very well, and bluntly, does a good job with many other radio waves too, across a pretty broad band of frequencies.... so the material that makes up the protective chassis of a microwave is ideal for making a reflector for wifi, since it was constructed with the idea of reflecting 2.4Ghz frequencies. Microwave ovens create the signal fairly crudely with a magnetron, but the underlying concepts are the same.

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