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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).
It would help if we knew what brand your gear is, maybe there are some known issues, firmware/driver updates, etc.
Linksys has a signal booster. It looks expensive and I've never used it, but it claims to be great.
Could be part of the problem.. Try turning your laptop 90 degress onto it's side. :)
http://www.remix.net/
like phones or a oft-used microwave?
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!"You might look into a "Faraday Cage," which I hear improves reception tremendously.
FWIW, my little linksys base station gives me solid coverage all over my house, and even outside. Maybe it's the base station or card?
I had the same problem at a friend's house. Turned out it was a few filing cabinets that would block the signal when the ethernet adaptor (SMC2670W) was placed on the floor.
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
The judicious use of a sledgehammer!
The removal of a few walls (I recomend avoiding weight-bearing walls)
Really improved my signal reception!
WARNING: you MAY not get your security deposit back
-OZ
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
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.
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!
age of your house you may have metal studs in the walls. This could cause problems. All of the other sugestions are great too. You may just have to play around with the position of the WAP and it's antenae.
Meddle thou not in the affairs of Dragons, for thou art crunchy and with most anything.
These APs go to 11...
[[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.