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Improving Indoors Wi-Fi Reception?

Posted by Cliff on from the these-things-need-better-antennas dept.

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?"

2 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Faraday. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Maybe it's the base station or card?

    Good call. I was thinking maybe it was the orange juice in his fridge creating anti-WiFi energy.

  2. Re:Brand? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I imagine its a LinkSys.

    They're utter pieces of shit. Tech support doesn't know what they're doing ("I'm sorry sir, you must have line-of-site with the WAP.") and their software is flaky.

    I've got a BEFW11S4 WAP/Cable Router that seems to work ok. The WMP11 (PCI Wireless NIC) would drop signal when the WAP was on the other side of the wall. Despite the fact that it was configured for Infrastructure only, it would consistantly pick up one of my neighbor's Ad-hoc "network" and want to use it as its preferred carrier.

    And yes, I switched from the default channel, the default SSID, the default IP range, etc. NOTHING was left to default settings. Still, like clockwork, it would drop connection roughly once or twice a month. LinkSys' solutuion was to uninstall the PCI NIC and *reset the configuration on the WAP back to factory default*. Then they expected me to leave it at default settings for a couple of days to see if it cleared up. Uhm, excuse me? Leave my internal network *wide open* to determine which is shittier - your hardware or software? I don't think so.

    I finally punched a hole in the wall and simply ran cable.

    Next time, I'm going Cisco or DLink. LinkSys isn't getting another dime of my money.