I can't figure it out. My router is in the living room away from cordless phones and microwaves etc. When I'm sat 2 metres away from it on the sofa I have a signal of 47%. When I go in the back garden, and the signal has to pass through the hall, dining room, kitchen and bathroom, it's 95 or even 100%.
What could be wrong?
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fluffychick hath wroth:
What model router? Duz it have internal antennas as in some Pre-N devices. If so, did you mount it vertically, like in the advertising literature? If so, place the router flat on the table so that the antenna works in all directions.
I assume you're using a laptop. Any particular model? Any particular wireless card?
Are you sure you're measuring the signal strength of your own wireless router? If you left the SSID at "Linksys", "default", "belkin", or the default SSID of your unspecified model wireless router, you may be connecting to someone else wireless router.
What are you using to measure signal level? If Windoze, you might want to try using Netstumbler for testing.
If your stuck with Vista, see:
How is your WiFi router antenna pointed ? when your're on the same level, it should be vertical, up or below the level of the Wifi transmision, it should be horizontal, the radiation patern is a donut round the "stick" so try to make improvements by directing the antenna's Or have the WiFi router position in the middle of your house.
If your just using the windows wireless zero config utility to measure signal strength I would try something else. After doing some test of different routers in my own home I found that in a test setup I had which included my router/ap and a test router/ap that had a different ssid than my regular router. Using netstumbler showed that the test router was about 10-15 db higher above the noise level than my normal router however viewing it with the WZC it showed my my main router as having four bars and my test router only having one, even though it was clearly stronger. What I noticed was that because my main router was in my preferred network list windows chose to make it look better to be than a network that was not in my list. (i was not connected and both routers were on different channels that had no other networks on them)
I removed my network from the preferred list and windows showed my main router as a 1 and my test router as a 2 or 3.
Anyway, said all of that to say this.. Don't trust windows and maybe even a third part app that came with your laptop/wireless card.
Adair
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