Where can I get the transmit power & antenna gain of the Netgear WNDR3400 router?

This is a great question!

I don't even know the answer.

I mean, I guess, uh ... well, isn't it 'better' to have the 'choice' of

2.4GHz and 5GHz?

I mean, my kids can be on the WII at 2.4GHz and I can be on my laptop at

5GHz and, um, I guess that would be a good thing, right?

I don't really know. I 'assume' it's a good thing. But I'm not really sure why because I didn't ask for both bands. They just came with the unit.

May I ask the more general question: Q: What good can we do with the additional 5GHz band in a router?

I read some of the docs and they're really hard for me just to find the antenna gain and transmit power - but I agree it's all there (somewhere).

My Netgear FCC ID is one less than yours: PY311100155

Here's what a friend told me when I mailed him the 5GHz report for the Netgear WNDR3400v2 router.(I haven't found the 2.4GHz report yet).

1. This is the test of the 5GHz band (5150 to 5725 MHz).
2. The same antennas are used for both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Note that an antenna with a broad enough bandwidth to range from 5.15 GHz to 5.725 GHz would have half the gain at half the frequency, and would easily operate at slightly lower than half the frequency, because it can't be sharply resonant and still have that broad a frequency response.
3. The antennas are just PC board traces. Roughly L shaped traces on the PC board.
4. Conducted power is power leaked into the AC power cord in one test, and power into the antenna in another test. The power going into the antennas is a hair over 16 dBm when 20 MHz channels are used.
5. The 26 dB bandwidth refers to the rule that says that an emissions outside of the band limits must be 26 dB lower than the intentional transmission limits.

One antenna is deliberately low gain, so that links to equipment above and below the PC board can be made. The other antenna has about 3.5 dBi of gain in the plane of the PC board to get some reasonable distance horizontally. Combining 16 dBm of power into a 3.5 dBi antenna gets you

19.5 dB of EIRP. Adding a bit for the 1.95 dBi gain antenna gets you a nominal 20 dB of EIRP at 5GHz.

I suppose if you had interference on 2.4G, you could go to 5.8G. I'm always 20db more than any nearby system. I suppose if you were in an apartment, the margin would be less.

I still like the Buffalo that I posted about on this group. It is MIMO with three detachable antennas. The antennas are monopoles that I run vertically polarized. The unit supports DD-WRT. I was hacking a bit and set up an open guest account with a virtual wireless access point, isolated from the rest of the network. I took it down since potentially I don't know what the hell I'm doing, but it sounds like a good way to set up wifi for guests without having to give out passwords.

It is hard to make good dual band antennas for both wifi bands since they are not harmonic.

Just about anything new you boy will be dual band. In my case, I have legacy gear that I am not willing to toss, so I will be running 2.4G for a while.

More channels than the three non-overlapping channels available at 2.4GHz, with the proviso that your client devices are actually capable of operating on the 5GHz band.

Yawn... The part that mentions Xirrus starts at about 7:30 and ends at 19:20. They repeated basically the same general discription several times. No real numbers but a fair description of what it does and how it's expected to be used. The Xirrus rep got hurt and didn't show up.

UPDATE:

So far I've found from the FCC site that the Netgear WNDR3400v2 router

5GHz transmit power is 16dBm and the antenna gain is 3.95dBi for a total EIRP of 20dB.

I'm still looking for the 2.4GHz FCC test spec...