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Improving Indoors Wi-Fi Reception?
VirtualUK asks: "I was given a WiFi base station and PCMCIA card for my laptop as a Christmas present so that I could read slashdot...urm I mean work, in any room in the house. When I read the manual it stated lofty figures of being able to work up to hundreds of feet inside office environments, so I felt that it would be more than capable of being able to allow me to stay connected in my tiny house. It seems however that the WiFi gods are against me as I tap this posting in the next room to the WiFi base station, a mere 20-30 feet away, just regular so-thin-I-can-hear-an-ant-fart walls, no kryptonite, no lead cladding and yet still I struggle to get a constant connection. I've found that shifting the laptop to face different directions sometimes helps, but as should it be this hard at such short range? Is there anything I can do to make my WiFi work better in a house environment?"
Here, this antenna rocks, built one myself and it is well worth the effort and the 10 bucks or so it costs in parts. Heck I can use my wireless down the block (almost).
Linksys has a signal booster. It looks expensive and I've never used it, but it claims to be great.
I've found that some things (water, water pipes, metal of any kind, walls to some extent, some metallised windows absorb/reflect the microwaves extensively. Sometimes you can move the base station so that it peeps around the edge of stuff, and then you can find good coverage over the whole building.
Also, try putting the aerial higher or lower, near a window or door may be good.
- find out if there's any interference
Some equipment, noteably, cordless phones; less likely microwave ovens (get your oven fixed if that's the case!) Bluetooth can also interfere.
- get better equipment
Ultimately I've found some equipment has poor range. You don't say what equipment you have. You may be able to modify the aerial on a base station, but try everything before doing that; it may make your equipment illegal.
I've found ranges of 100 ft or so in a building is quite achievable, although sighting of the base station is sometimes critical.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"http://www.trevormarshall.com/byte_articles/byte1. htm
QUOTE.. And this leads us nicely into the real world. The designers of the antennas for PCMCIA cards face a real problem. It is not easy to form antennas onto the small circuit board inside the bulbous plastic cover that sticks of the end of the PCMCIA card. I won't go into the technology here, but below is plotted a typical sensitivity measurement for a laptop equipped with a PCMCIA WLAN card. The effective gain of this antenna is low, less than 0 dBi (typically -4 dBi) and it is very directional.
http://www.remix.net/
Check out the telex 2.4ghz antenna page for some antennas which will get you some serious signal. I had great luck with their 9.5dbi omni and have strong signal (5 bars on a tibook) at about 30 meters, which is enough to cover my back yard. (Remember that decibel is a logarithmic scale.) They apparently don't advertise these things, but they should.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
It could be your laptop's weak Wi-Fi antenna. A friend of mine has an Orinoco card, and I have an AirPort card. I tend to get better signal, which I believe is due to my PowerBook's internal antenna.
I don't know how practical a solution it is, but you might be able to make/buy an antenna to attach to your laptop to improve signal.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
The higher the better. Always put it above 6' at least. Mounting from the ceiling works well too. Also, make sure that when you go through a wall it is straight not catycorner (sp?).
Good luck.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
I've got a good deal of WiFi equipment, a linksys AP, a netgear AP (two locations), a Netgear PCMCIA card, a microsoft USB WiFi adapter, a Netgear PCI card, an AirPort card in my iBook, and two Orinico (Lucent WaveLAN) cards.
I run windows XP/2k and Mac OS X. It is my experience that the Microsoft and Netgear products are worthless as far as client adapters are concerned.
The microsoft USB device seems to JAM my net everytime i set it up. If i turn it on, no new clients can join the network. Both netgear adapters can't keep a TCP connection for more than a minure (with 100% reception).
Now, the Lucent stuff is GREAT! it work everywhere flawlessly, same for AirPort (although i think that they use the same chipset). Both the netgear and linksys APs work great.
So, cheapo client adapters are a no go. Stick with Lucent stuff.
I had the same problem (Linksys AP, Linksys PCMCIA, and Ambicom PCMCIA) where tilting my laptop made my reception noticably better. Moving the AP (higher) was the biggest no cost boost. Changing the antennae config helped, too. Getting better antennae, however, is the way to go (at least in my house). I got some off an old Proxim rangelan base station and now I get great reception all over the house. These may not have been the originals, as the AP was donated by my old CS department for Robocup 98.
I had a similar problem with my setup when I first installed it. I would get strengths below 50% and frequent drop offs. The first thing I did was change the channel the gear was using and my probems went away.
There's a terrific graph in the 802.11 Handbook (the IEEE companion guide to the 802.11 standard) which simulate the signal strength of the signal in a typical environment by using raytracing techniques.
Basically, it's not necessarily the wall right in between you and the AP, but other potential radio reflectors that are affecting your signal. Moving the access point up, down, left, or right by a few inches could make all the difference. So move it around!
Just to state a counter-example, I'm using a D-Link 614+ (22Mbs) which works perfectly with my iBook (airport - 11Mbs)
...
The access point has got two external antennas and gives me a great coverage in the whole house. I was thinking about getting external antennas before, but I'm not going to need it =)
Now everything I'm waiting for is for the 22Mbs cards to get supported under Linux. The drivers are out, but I prefer knowing they work well before buying the hardware
You don't mention which brand of WiFi card you use.
While there doesn't seem to be TOO much difference between APs. (Or at least, even cheap APs like those from Linksys, D-Link, etc. perform far better than even high-end client cards), some client cards are MUCH better than others. While Lucent Orinoco cards are not specced as having much higher transmit power than your run-of-the-mill Prism2 (Linksys, D-Link, Belkin, etc etc.), their receiver is much more sensitive. As a result, with the same AP, an Orinoco gets much better range. I have both D-Link DWL-650s, a Belkin Prism2 card, and an Orinoco Silver. The Orinoco beats the other cards, hands-down.
If you want the best range possible at all costs, most Cisco cards have 100 mW transmit (as opposed to 20-25 for most others) and the highest receive sensitivity of the mainstream cards. The only better card I've seen is the Demarctech Reliawave (One of the few good Prism-based cards - Best receive sensitivity AND the highest transmit power I've seen.) Ciscos are also the most likely to work in an office environment if you want to bring it to work, since many corporations only trust LEAP and none of the other 802.1x solutions so far.
Orinocos are now $50-60 if you search hard enough. Get one. You won't regret it. If that doesn't work, THEN look into boosting the AP signal with a Linksys booster, but the most important is to have a good client first.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Plain and simple. It's the card.
I say that, because I had the exact same problem when I got my wireless setup (linksys card and router). Sitting on the couch (about 25 feet from the AP), I would have to tilt the laptop on my lap, just to get a signal. It was quite awkward, and I was REALLY unimpressed after reading on the box that I should get hundreds of feet, and yet, it lost connection if I put it down on the coffee table.
I read some online forums, and saw people who had much better luck with Orinoco cards. I called where I had ordered it from, and got an RMA for the linksys card, and bought a brand new Orinoco silver card. I can now be anywhere in the house, and 300 feet down the street with perfect signal.
This made wireless just what I thought it should be. Stable, and good signals everywhere. I kept the linksys AP, because that seemed to work great with the Orinoco card.
Find a friend who has an Orinoco card, and try it on your laptop. You will buy one that night.
--Spack
I had the same problem when I first got my SMC wireless router, and upgrading the firmware fixed the problem.
www.nycwireless.com has a good intro to setting up a hotspot and what equiptment can extend your rage, i'm sure all of this info can also be applied to an indoor setup.
give it a try
Kenny Sabarese
www.kennysabarese.com
For those that are really thinking about plugging your AP into a 220v dryer outlet... don't do it.
You'll just end up being listed in the Darwin awards at worst, at best you'll likely start a fire.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
[[If I have an 802.11b base station, and my neighbor has an 802.11b base station, can we communicate between our base stations?]]
Yes, set the APs to bridge to each other's MAC addresses. You've created a wireless bridge between two networks.
[[For that matter, can two access cards just communicate with each other]]
Yes, this is called "Ad-Hoc" mode. It's a checkbox when you're setting the network up; in Windows XP it reads something like "This is a computer-to-computer (ad-hoc) wireless network that does not use an access point." At which point you just worry about SSID and WEP keys if any.
I have the original Linksys WAP11 access point and use Linksys WPC11 PCMCIA cards. I have a small 1-bedroom apartment, and can barely maintain a signal when I lay in bed with my laptop (the access point is on the other side of my apt in the living room--total distance
I was shocked and seriously disappointed with the horrible signal strength, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot that I can do without modifying the equipment. I know that rotating my laptop so that the PCMCIA card is pointed towards the AP helps, but of course, when I am in bed, the antenna is on the 'wrong' side.
Raising the height of the AP, along with rotating the AP (so that the antennae are towards the center of the apt.) seems to help a little, but it is marginal.
A friend (also with a WAP11) purchased an antenna that claimed to boost the signal, but it simply didn't work with the WAP11. They also refused to reply to his e-mails asking for a refund. So I've been reluctant to purchase a replacement antenna that claims to increase AP power.
At this point, I would say that making my own is the only thing I would be willing to try.