Can you hear me now? We’ve all had the experience of dropped calls and loss of signal, but it looks like one way to get better cell phone reception is to open a special umbrella. Originally conceived as the Voda-brella, the since renamed Vodafone Booster Brolly is an umbrella filled with gadgetry that boosts your signal strength. And it can charge your phone too.

Somehow, this seems like a quintessentially Londoner thing to do, but inventor Kenneth Tong actually grew up in Hong Kong. In any case, the umbrella has a built-in high-gain umbrella that is able to catch the radio waves from a Vodafone transmitter. There’s also a low power signal repeater, so what you get in effect is a small “signal shower” above your head.

Yes, there may be some health concerns here, but you can’t deny how useful this could be. Of course, it’s really only useful on a rainy day (which never happens in the UK), though I suppose the Booster Brolly can turn into a Booster Parasol on a sunny day. What’s more, the Booster Brolly is also lined with a dozen 2V solar panels, giving you a source of power to juice up your handset. It can be used to power a flashlight too, in case you get lost in the dark.

Of course, this is just a mad scientist’s concept at the moment, so there’s no saying when and if it’ll ever reach a commercial release.

[Source]

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The Venetian innovation, which comes by way of Fabrizio Tamburini and his team of researchers, effectively takes radio waves and twists them into a vortex. As a result, you’re able to send several discrete signals over the same frequency, theoretically (though not practically) providing us with an “infinite number of channels in a given, fixed bandwidth.”

Basically, the multiple signals are sent out with different degrees of spin (“orbital angular momentum states”) and the receiver can then key in on one signal or the other. The provided video demonstrates this using the standard 2.4GHz Wi-Fi band over a distance of 442 meters. You can skip ahead to 7:28 to see the actual demo itself.

As one commenter points out, though, this approach “only works for line-of-sight (LOS) transmission. Once a signal bounces off a surface, the angular structure of the wave is scattered, and the polarization (or vorticity in this case) is lost.” So, is this a viable solution or is it shoddy science?

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