Boosting outgoing signal

Jun 19, 2005 2 Replies

Rate this thread:

jberry 21 years ago

A topic with a similar name appeared a few months ago; I have a similar question.

I have a laptop with a Belkin PCMCIA wireless card. Where I am staying, I can pick up a local wireless hotspot (it is not an unsecured signal of a neighbour) using 802.11b. Download connectivity is good, with 40-80 kBps file transfer. Upload is a whole other world, with communication going at maybe 175 Bytes per second (note, no k). This kind of makes sense, because the horking big transmitter can be picked up by my little Belkin even indoors, but it is surprising that their tower can pick up the transmission from my card at all.

So I was thinking: what if I used something else at hand? I have an SMC Barricade g SMC2804WBRP-G router, 802.11g. I could mount it in a window facing this tower to get the best possible signal. I can connect this to my computer using an ethernet cable, but it doesn't want to connect to the outside world by wireless. I guess I'm trying to put a square peg in a round hole. Or maybe trying to eat a sandwich without having my teeth touch bread first.

Two questions:

Is it possible to make a router work like a wireless card? It has a whole alphabet soup of possible configurations, such as PPPoE, but I don't know where to start.
What is the name of the hardware I should be looking for to do this task, and are there any recommendations.

Vote

Floyd L. Davidson 21 years ago

That might be the case, but I doubt it. However you can check it find out!

Take your laptop for a stroll. Plonk it down somewhere in the near vicinity of this tower (anywhere that you are positive will give you a really good signal), and try it there. If you then get a good uplink bitrate, all of this is worth thinking about. If you get the same old slow pokey rate, it ain't gonna do us any good to worry about how you connect!

I'm not familiar with that particular router.

Some will do it, some won't. What you want to look for is something like "Client Mode", as opposed to "Access Point Mode". To work as a router with wifi access it has to be an Access Point, and might very well have no way to switch it to act as a Client.

The various WRT54G(S) models from Linksys will do it *if* you upload one of the various third party firmware packages.

It is also possible that some brand of repeater will work too. But since they tend to work only with AP of the same brand, without knowing what model the AP is, it's a real crap shoot to try repeaters.

Vote

jberry 21 years ago

Thanks for your help!

The pdf manual says I can disable the "wireless module function", but no mention of "client mode". Lots of hits for "client" but nothing resembling "client mode".

Looks like I should have bought the highly user-configurable Linksys instead of the mail-in rebate coupon SMC.

Vote