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for want of a decent wifi signal
By booyaa | December 18, 2005
i’ve just finished placing the adsl/router/wifi access point. it’s been in our kitchen since we moved in, and this in the only room that has a telephone socket (yes - we’ve got this on our next flat/house check list). the reason it’s being moved after all this time, is that the server room (aka spare room) was wholly reliant, on the signal bouncing off the back garden wall or the hallway. it was often hit and miss affair. i say reliant because all our interior walls are concrete! wifi’s amazing, but it can’t go through solid materials. heck, i’ve found out that wifi gets freaked out by heavy fog, but that’s another story for another time!
so on to my repositioning of the wifi access point…
i was aided by a screw driver, my trust 30 foot wind up telephone extension and my zaurus. i opted for running the telephone extension along the hall entrance, which is where the kitchen, front and living room doors all meet. this is where the screw driver came in handy, I used it to lift the carpet away from the carpet grips. and after running the extension wire in between the wall and carpet grips, i replaced the carpet. once the wifi access point was in a safe place, i then switch tools and this is where i used my zaurus.
the sharp zaurus os (based on linux and using trolltech’s qt graphics toolkit) has a built in wifi signal/quality monitor. i used this, to confirm my initial suspicions; that the living room was the flat’s wifi sweet spot.
i took some measurements before i repositioned the wifi access point, the server room had signal strength of 80% and quality of 30%. after the repositioning this went up to 100% for strength and 95% for quality.
i tried this exercise before with my old work laptop, but found it cumbersome trying to get the antenna at the same level as the server room pc’s antenna. i even tried to use one of those new fangled wifi hotspot detectors, but the design was no intutitive.
so my little handy zaurus, i salute you!
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