Better Signal?

iviv

iviv

iviv

Soldato
Joined
2 Jun 2007
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Mornington Crescent
To cut a long story short, my bed broke, so I need a new bed, the new one won't fit in my old room, so my PC room is now my bedroom, and my bedroom is now my PC room. The two rooms joined on to each other, my PC is only about 5m away from where it used to be, yet my wireless signal strength has dropped from 4 to 2 bars. This is on a wireless n network, I'm connected at 216Mbps, but from time to time it just goes dead, I can't even ping the router, so I'm assuming this is down to the signal quality being so low. But... firstly, I don't see why its so low. There used to be about 2 internal walls between the router and the PC, now there are 2 walls, and a bit of an external wall, so I assume this is the source of the problem, but there aren't many options available here on where my PC goes, so onto my main question.

What can I do to boost my signal quality? Everything's already wireless n, part of me wants to get a long cat5 cable and run it through the loft, but I don't think my parents would be keen on my drilling holes in the ceilings. We did have an old ADSL router, which I think may be usable as a bridge, but would that work with a wireless n network, as it was only wireless g?
Any other options I've not considered? Thanks!
 
I would have a look at which channels other wireless networks in the area are using to make sure yours is not clashing with someone else and causing interference.....

This utility is great for checking this.

http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider

If there are lots of others using the same channel then try changing yours to see if improved the reliability of yours.
 
Bah, woke up this morning, I've still got 3 bars of signal, but I'm getting nothing from the router. Tried restarting my PC and its the same, the router's page just keeps timing out, as do web pages. Occasionally it works for a couple of seconds before cutting out again... and I don't see why on earth it would be doing this. The sent/recieved packet values are both going up, so its obviously communicating both ways, it just doesn't seem to want to send me anything of value? I'm currently on my laptop connected just fine, so it can't be a wireless issue. I'm going to try changing the channels anyway, there may be something elsse interfering with my signals, though I'm not sure what it could be. Worth a try at any rate.

Edit: Moved a metal ladder we'd been using for decorating out of the way, now I've got 4 bars of strength, amplitude has dropped to 55dB, got just over 1 million packets sent and almost 4 mil recieved, but the connection is still awful. Out of interest, I tried pinging my router:

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/662/pingeu.jpg

Bounces between 2 and 2000ms, so obviously something is wrong... but I don't have a clue what. I tried placing my laptop on my PC and it constantly pinged from 1-5ms. Indicating the issue isn't with the signal strength, but with my PC itself? I honestly don't have a clue what to change in order to try and get a better connection, or a stable ping, come to that.
 
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Ignore the above post, that's was due to me having too much fun with a new toy and not realising that inSSIDer was saturating my network card and preventing my traffic getting through in a timely fashion.

Still, my PC is currently sitting in the middle of the room, which is no good. I've put it back in the corner, and now ping requests are mostly not responding, the connection's not really any good there. However, I can sit my laptop on the PC case and it works fine. Heck, my laptop downstairs is further away and it works fine, and its only a wireless g card, while my PC is n with 3 aerials, so you would think that it could manage. I looked into cable options to essentially let me move the aerials away from my PC case but couldn't find anything to buy at a reasonable price, so I'm running out of ideas. I'm about to try new drivers, ones from Edimax who made the card, and one which is just the ralink chipset drivers, on the offchance that either of them will boost performance somehow :x
 
iviv said:
Edit: Moved a metal ladder we'd been using for decorating out of the way, now I've got 4 bars of strength, amplitude has dropped to 55dB, got just over 1 million packets sent and almost 4 mil recieved, but the connection is still awful. Out of interest, I tried pinging my router:
Click to expand...

The amplitude is probably -55dB. In most cases, the minus sign is omitted. The minus sign crops up because of logarithms. 0dB means that the signal strength at the receiver is the same as at the transmitter. Anything less than that means that the signal strength has degraded (as you would expect). So, for argument's sake, if the amplitude said 90dB before then if it now said 55dB then that would be an improvement!

55dB sounds reasonable to me.
 
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