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Wireless Range

I have a wireless access point in the upstairs front room of my house where the internet connection is. Its a Belkin 802.11g My laptop has a belkin PCMCIA wireless card in it.

This combination appears to have insufficient range beacuse.......

If i sit in our lounge which is dwonstairs and near the rear of the house the strength of the signal is dependant on the angle i sit at. If i go into the kitchen, slightly further away, there is no signal strength.

How do I boost the range of this set up?

Thanks

Paul Martin

Reply to
Paul Martin
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You could knock a wall down! Seriously, the way houses are built and the very high frequencies used mean that range is restricted. Some walls have plasterboard with a silver type foil backing, so this prevents radio frequencies passing through as it acts like a big shield. Brick also attenuates microwaves quite a bit. You mentioned about the angle. If you can imagine two brick walls in parallel, with the router on one side and the PC on the other, the signal loss will be noticed. Move the router to one end of the wall and the PC at the other on the opposite side and there is much more brick to get through, so the signal might fall off. It gets worse if there are a few walls. You could try moving the router or get a piece of card and glue some tinfoil to it. Curve it slightly and stand it about 3inches behind the aerial on the router. This will increase the signal in one direction. I had to do that myself and it also stopped my neighbours PC from being heard by my router as it acted like a shield in the other direction. Experiment! Or you can buy a high gain aerial to plug in or make one using a Pringles tube. Google for wifi aerial from pringles tube and have a go.

Reply to
Rob

Hi Paul,

This is very normal with 802.11g or even g+, wireless signals can reach more than 600 feets on open space.

One solution is to use 2 x wireless access point with LAN to LAN bridging and roaming or to use a new router with MIMO technology.

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Panda

Reply to
Panda

I am no wireless expert however I have fixed a similar problem by changing the antenna angle so that the desires reception area is in a plane a right angles to the antenna rod /and/ also by forcing 801.11b in a b/g device. Both seemed to help a bit and together I ended up with something that worked really well whereas as default (vertical antenna and auto select of b/g) it was basicaly useless.

The houe in question was a narrow but tall house with devices several floors apart. I made the two antennas (one upstairs, one downstairs) horizontal, parallel and made the (omni) antenna planes point as described above.

Reply to
anybody43

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