Extended wireless antennas, any good?

[Dano]

Does anybody have any experience with the extenders or omni-directional ones? I have a clients pc which is having trouble connecting to her wireless network, the signal is there albeit poor but it cannot get a response from the router, my laptop connects fine but thats probably due to the better aerial in the laptop I suspect.

Anyway, I figure it's either a dodgy network card or I just need a better antenna, any comments on them at all?

Sadly she has a specific location for the pc and it's got quite a lot between it and the router so I cannot persuade her to move it at all.

Ta.

 

[Avalon]

If you can't move the PC can you move the router ? Even a small distance could make all the difference. Either way before you go with a high gain antenna' move the router so it's next to the pc and at least test that the PC will connect to the router under optimum conditions. You'll feel like a pregnant guppy if you buy an antenna, go round to fit it and it turns out it was the card only to have to go away, buy a new card and come back again...

 

[ANDARIAL]

I have used upgraded antennas and yes in my case they do work,gave my network access at a constant 54 mbps after the upgrade whereas before it varied from 1-54 mbps

 

[swinnie]

I have used upgraded antennas and yes in my case they do work,gave my network access at a constant 54 mbps after the upgrade whereas before it varied from 1-54 mbps

I had exactly the same result. Lowest was about 3Mpbs, now it rarely goes below 20Mbps.

 

[Dano]

Thanks all, yes, first thing I did was to connect the card to router while they were next to each other, been there and done that before as they say