How to boost sinal?

Yes. The position/orientation where you find it works best!

And, whatever that is, the only way to discover it is by experimenting with antenna position/orientation.

The 2400MHz signals just do not go through any conductive material that is more than about 4" square (or in diameter for a circle), but they are often reflected off such surfaces and sometimes the results can be either surprising or annoying.

For example, trying to get wifi to work from one building to another can be a problem because walls that have fiber glass insulation with a foil backing for a vapor barrier simply won't pass a signal through. So the antennas have to be mounted at a window. And you would expect the windows would have to be able to see each other... but they might not need to!

If the windows face a building that also has metal in the walls, everything might just work with the signal being reflected instead of passing through the other building.

Typically if one antenna is oriented vertically, the other one must be also. But sometimes the polarization of the signal is changed as it is reflected off of another surface. Hence trying different orientations for the antennas is worth doing and may have surprisingly significant results (20 dB change in signal, or maybe even more).

If you are using 10 MB ethernet, go wireless. If you have

100Mbit, try to use wired connections to whatever degree you can. Is it possible to reach the 2nd floor with CAT5 cable from either the 1st or 3rd floor? If so, make those two a wired network, and the other floor a wireless connection.
Reply to
Floyd L. Davidson
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Desktop on 3rd floor with (wired to) Linksys router, laptop on 1st floor. Laptop sometimes (often?) loses or won't make connection, and always shows Strength: Low, with speeds all over the place,,,like 2 Mbs to 24 Mbs.

  1. Is there an optimum positioning or orientation for the router or its two antennas?

  1. Query: I suppose I could moves router to 2nd floor and make desktop also wireless? I'd rather not, tho.

Brad

Reply to
Avalanche

desktop

A repeater might work for you, if you have a wrt54g then a wap54g will work well. Also try orientating you antennas horizontal as this tends to be best for most laptop reception, or get a laptop card like this

formatting link
. I heard this card gets as good of reception as the pre-n but for only

40 bucks
Reply to
Airhead

You could try putting the aerials horizontally, basically is all down to experimenting because radio signals travel is unpredictable. Also put a card covered with silver foil bent into a V shape behind the aerial(s), or else bent into a parabolic arc.

If your PCMCIA card sticks out from your laptop, you could try silver foil underneath. Another alternative is an USB adapter on a length of cable (up to 5m), which is much easier to position for best signal (half an inch can make a difference) and to back up with silver foil reflector.

Failing all that moving the router to middle floor should make big difference. Regards, Martin

Reply to
Martin²

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