| William H. Magill on Tue, 11 Mar 2003 16:09:08 -0500 |
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On Tuesday, March 11, 2003, at 02:42 PM, Paul wrote: Jeyes, David (371) wrote:I have a Linksys setup in my apartment, with not as great of results. 20 ft and 2 plaster walls and the signal is weak- generally not even at 50%. But, from what I've heard from a few people, D-Link has much better signal strength.Hah. I'm using a wireless D-Link router and PCI card. I thought one of them was defective at first! There are two main components to signal strength -- the transmitter power and receiver sensitivity. The transmitter can output the same power and be viewed with different signal strength by two different receivers who have different sensitivity. Pay attention to antenna orientation, and the construction of the material "covering" the antenna of your receiver. (I'm assuming that the transmitter on the antenna is in the clear, ala the Linksys. I have an original tangerine iBook. Its antenna is in the edge of the top, which is of plastic. It has far greater signal sensitivity than -- shows greater signal strength -- than a friends Titanium PowerBook sitting right next to it. Why? Because the TIpowerbook has the antenna hiding behind a titanium shell! Similarly, with the antenna in the iBook vertical, the "polarization" is much different from that of my iPaq which with an 802.11 card that is normally horizontal! The reason that the Apple Airport Base Station is shaped like a Hershey's kiss is not only pretty design it is also quite functional. The antenna in the base station is along the 45 degree slope, thereby "optimizing" the signal strength presented to either a horizontal or vertical receiving antenna. Change the orientation of the unit, and the signal strength at the receiver changes. BTW I also have an original LinkSys 4-port AP/10-100 Hub (which has two "rabbit ears" type antennas). That works well from an RF point of view, but I don't use it mainly because the firmware sucks (I was doing a lot of very early 802.11 testing) ... There is a new version, and naturally, the old model can't be loaded with the new firmware...bleah. T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg]- Tru64 5.1a magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com _________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.netisland.net/mailman/listinfo/plug
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