wireless antenna

I have a new (6 months old) Gateway laptop, model 4025. It has worked well on the wireless system until I recently moved my office about 400 feet away. The signal had been low but now it is gone. I am left with dial-up! I want to add an external antenna to get back on the system but there is no external antenna connection. I don't even know where the wireless card. How do I locate it to see what I can do? or do I have to buy a new card and insert it into the card slot and then modify that card for the external antenna? Thanks

Reply to
hawkeye
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"hawkeye" hath wroth:

Well, there are a few options, none of which are guaranteed. 400ft is a LONG way to go, especially if you're going through walls, trees, buildings, etc. Before trying any of these, make sure that you at least have some line of sight, or it probably won't work.

  1. Open the lid that covers the radio (bottom of laptop). Note the two tiny pieces of coax cable going to a MiniPCI card. Remove one cable and attach a u.FL to RP-SMA pigtail. Purchase an external directional antenna with a RP-SMA connector. Be careful because the u.FL connectors are very fragile and will not survive more than a few insertion/removal cycles.
  2. Buy a wirless USB dongle, or PCMCIA radio card. Disable, in software, the internal wireless card. Hopefully, it will work better but will probably require an external antenna.
  3. Install a reflector or external antenna on your wireless access point that's aimed in the direction of your new office.
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  4. If this is all in the same building, consider a wired or wireless extension that uses either the phone lines (HomePNA) or the power lines (HomePlug). If this is an office building, power line probably won't work because there's too much junk on the power lines.
  5. Install a wireless repeater, range extender, etc. I don't like these, but they sometimes work. A WDS bridge/repeater is better, but that requires that your unspecified access point and the WDS repeater both support WDS and should probably be the same model.
  6. Run 400ft of CAT5 cable and forget about wireless. Although the official limit is 300ft, I've run 1000ft without errors or problems.
  7. If the building has a CATV system, you can piggyback data on the cable. See:
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    one such system. There are others.
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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