Recently I bought a Bluetooth wireless audio receiver so I could play some audio through my HiFi without having to plug the laptop in. Ultimately I'll be doing this via WiFi and my local server, but as that machine isn't connected to the HiFi yet, this seemed like a good solution.

The problem is that the Eee 1000 has its bluetooth antenna just to the left of the touchpad, right at the front. This means that when I type, the signal is attenuated enough to make the playback stutter badly.

First I tried scraping off the EMI shielding from the bottom case, and removing the tinfoil from the upper case, but this made nearly no difference.

I considered relocating the module but there are no good places and I'm not sure why the connector for it has so many pins (10 pins for a USB device??!).

I did try placing it to the far right where the nonexistant 3G antenna would be and it was _slightly_ better, but there is still a lot of shielding about and removing it would have required cutting into the mainboard.

So what to do? In the end I decided to leave the module where it is and relocate its antenna, and here is what I did.

Cut the antenna feed track off the board. be sure to cut it back all the way, as it connects to ground at the corner of the PCB.

The completed board mod. The wire is antenna coax from an old defunct laptop.

Cut off and remove the shielding from inside the screen.

The antenna in place. All I did was strip the external shield from the coax, as is common in WiFi access point antennas. You need to strip approx 30mm of the shielding. I simply cut mine back to the samme length as the antenna in my Bluetooth receiver.

The reinstalled module, with the new antenna feed wire attached nicely to the motherboard.

The antenna wire had plenty of room in the hinge.