You guys are probably tired of answering this question......lol!

I finally got my WLAN setup operating today with the arrival of my V5 WRT54G. BTW, it came with 1.00 f/w but I upgraded to 1.06 just in case. On my thinkpad I have an Atheros mini pci card feeding two 4 element coaxial collinear antennas that are tacked on the back of my screen with hot glue. The Atheros card puts out 100mw and I think the WRT54G puts out 30mw.

Anyways, I went for a walk to do a range check and I got about 1,400 ft before I lost signal due to interference from other WLANs on the same channel & with the same SSID. This was NOT line of sight - I was going through houses & buildings.

I'll repeat the test sometime today now that I'm on a ch that (according to Net Stumbler) nobody else is using in my area and I now have a unique SSID.

Now - on to my questions:

1) Is it me or is 1,400' above average range for WiFI? 2) I googled and read that WEP is not 100% secure so I switched to WPA Personal TKIP but Net Stumbler still reports that I'm running WEP? I verified several times that I am running WPA. What's up with that? 3) Anyone have a source for RP-TNC connectors that can be used with LMR-400 (.405" dia) coax? I'm gonna build a pair of 16 element collinear antennas and put 'em up my 60' tower -maybe.

Thanks for the advice!

"Ken Bessler" hath wroth:

Typical for WRT54G is about 35mw.

4 element collinear should have about 8dBi gain.

Impressive and much more than I would expect. The catch is that although methinks you were able to see the WRT54G with Netstumbler, I can't tell if you would actually be able to use the connection at

1400ft. My guess is that it would appear and disappear along with reflections and interference.

That's Netstumbler. It never displayes WPA.

You don't want the RP-TNC on the end of a stiff piece of LMR-400. Use N connectors on the LMR-400 and an N to RP-TNC pigtail, with more flexible coax cable. However, if you insist: |

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Incidentally, the loss at 2.4Ghz for 60ft of LMR-400 is 4dB. That's more than half your power and sensitivity gone in the coax (plus about

0.5dB per connector pair, plus pigtail, etc). You might wanna consider doing PoE (power over ethernet) to the antenna, mounting the radio on the tower top, and not using coax.

Hmmmm.... 16 element collinear should be about 14dBi gain (depending on combiner/splitter configuration). Two of them will give you perhaps 17dBi. Why not just buy a common 24dBi barbeque grill dish and be done with it?

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