Fixing WiFi on a PIPO M9 Pro tablet
Ever since I received my PIPO M9 Pro tablet, I've been experiencing WiFi issues. Every 5-10 minutes, the tablet would simply lose its WiFi connection. Usually it took a few minutes before it would reconnect. No need to say this was very frustrating when doing anything that involves the network connection.
I've come across various forums (FreakTab, ArcTablet and Tablette-Chinoise) full of people complaining about the same issues. The problem seems to be caused by bad placement and bad insulation of the internal WiFi antenna.
Various solutions were proposed:
- Removing the grounding wire that touches the WiFi antenna and its wire
- Replacing the grounding wire and the WiFi antenna's wire by (better) shielded wires, using wires from old USB cables (involves soldering)
- Isolating the WiFi antenna and its wire by using insulating tape (see instruction video)
I'm not very experienced with soldering and I didn't really like removing ground wires (they're there for a reason, right?), so I went for the last method.
I carefully opened my tablet using guitar plectra to put between the screen and the back case. The guy in the video does it with plastic cards, but I couldn't find anything like that. The WiFi antenna turns out to be the black plastic thing glued to the case at the top right. I carefully unglued it by using a screwdriver and I cutted some pieces of cardboard to put underneath the antenna. I then stabilized these pieces of cardboard with some insulation tape, glued the antenna on it and covered the antenna and its wire with a few more layers of insulating tape.
After wrapping it all back together, I rebooted the tablet and the WiFi connection now seems to be much more stable. No more disconnects and usually more than 50Mbps where I had like 10Mbps before. I can't believe these tablets are sold with such a design failure. I guess that's what you get when buying cheap chinese electronics, right? ;-)