Not to scale

A little while ago, over at another place, we talked about how some companies are really bad at communicating information about their product range to potential customers. Too often, there's an assumption that the customer knows exactly what he/she is looking for, down to its alpha-numeric name,

I bought one of these Netgear antennae, in order to improve wireless reception in the Biscuit Studio (aka my garage), where I work on Fridays now.

Most weeks, I hasten to add, reception has been fine, but last Friday I had a bit of a shitty day, and I wondered whether I shouldn't boost the signal, which has to pass through two or three walls in order to reach in there. So the original antenna on my Netgear router is about yay big, 10 cm or so, and (looking at the photo on the Netgear web site, which is reproduced on my own company's web site), I assumed this booster antenna would be, oh, twice as big, d'you think? 20cm, say, and about as thick as your index finger.

But it's odd, isn't it, how Netgear choose to display the antenna without any of the other bits that come with it, like the wall-mounting bracket, the lightning suppressor, the outdoor cable, all of which might give you some idea that the thing is actually HUGE - 60 cm long, and as thick as, well, as thick as, approximately as thick as an erect member. And it weighs a TON, too, so it's not like you can prop it in a corner.

Confronted with the size of it, I immediately started to worry about the microwaves cooking my kids' brains, not to mention my wife's reaction when she saw it.

So, given that I'd been getting about 1 bar of Airport reception in the garage with a 10 cm teeny weeny antenna, what do you reckon with this light sabre thing? I imagined it would set off some kind of terror alert at an RAF base in Oxfordshire, but no. Still one bar. Ho hum.

My suggestion to Netgear: change the artwork so it shows the antenna next to something, in order to give it scale. A child's head, say, with an egg frying on top of it.