energy approved windows and RF

My experience says "Yes".

I used to have a WiFi access point in my garage, with a somewhat- directional antenna aimed in the direction of the back of the house (with the beam travelling out through the garage walls, and then into the house through the walls again). I could usually get an acceptable signal in the rear bedrooms.

We had our old windows replaced with new double-pane "low-E" windows, having a thin metal film coating on the glass to inhibit IR transmission.

Poof... the signal was now substantially weaker, tending towards unusable, many of the same spots it been OK before. Two of the newly upgraded windows were in the line-of-sight paths between the access point and the new "dead zones".

I had to move the access point into the den.

Reflection. Which is bad for phone/radio/wifi.

El 05-08-11 22:11, Dave Platt escribió:

Hello Dave,

My experience also says "yes". Attenuation (whether or not caused by adsorption or reflection), goes at least from VHF to UHF.

There is more: some fibre insulation has a metallic top layer. When they install it well, the use metal tape for sealing. Result: bad coverage of cell phone networks, bad reception of DVBT, analog radio, etc. Just opening one window, changes the situation.

Wim PA3DJS

Yup. Exactly my experience (although in my case, the shielding in the walls itself didn't come from metallic-layered insulation, but from the "chicken wire" in the stucco wall surface.

The metallic-trimmed insulation is probably even worse. In the interest of being able to shield your house from even the hottest Egyptian tropical sunlight, it turns the building into a Pharaoh day cage.

(couldn't resist, not that I tried very hard)

These can be quite problematic.

One thing to try is some passive antenna systems. Install an outdoor antenna outside the house (preferably at the top of the top of the building). Use a low loss (at 2.4 GHz) coaxial cable to bring the signal into the room where it is needed. Use a omnidirectional antenna to re-radiate the signal to the handset in the room (preferably not more than 1-2 m from the re-radiation antenna).

Passive antenna systems are usually OK anywhere in the world. Anything requiring active RF amplification are typically under the control of local telecommunication authorities (except WLAN frequencies).

Using outdoor WiFi access points, Ethernet cables through the wall into a building and another WiFi AP inside the building might also be OK.

I think it depends on coating. We have _reflective_coated_ thermo-pane (two glass layers with some kind of gas fill in between) in every window in our house. I get super cell phone reception, so good that I'm considering a docking station to connect the cell phones to house extensions and dumping the land lines. ...Jim Thompson

We have a course of study at the college in ancient Egyptian plumbing.

We call it the Pharaoh faucet major.

{;-)

Jim