Monday, February 28, 2005
Damn
On Friday night I had the chance to try out the new aerial and unfortunately it seemed to make no difference at all to the WAP signal strength. It made so little difference that I now suspect I made some sort of mistake in my testing.
My first step was to remove the existing 1dB aerial from the WAP and add my new one. In its PVC pipe it is about 50cm long and about 2.5cm in diameter. Balancing it carefully in the window I then grabbed a neighbours laptop with some good signal strength software that came with the laptop and checked reception. It did not seem to be any different. Connecting it to the other WAP also seemed to have the same problem.
Of course all this connection and disconnection of antennas and WAPs disrupted our little network and one of my neighbours really needed to be online so I had to switch it all back and give up on the testing in frustration.
Thinking back now I seem to remember the WAPs have both an internal and external antenna. On their setup software you can force the use of the internal or external antenna but we have it set on automatic which in theory should choose the best but I am not sure what causes it to switch and exactly how it makes its decision. What I probably should have done is force it to use the external. That way I could be sure my results were correct.
So now I plan to test the integrity of it again and try forcing the WAP to use the new antenna.
My first step was to remove the existing 1dB aerial from the WAP and add my new one. In its PVC pipe it is about 50cm long and about 2.5cm in diameter. Balancing it carefully in the window I then grabbed a neighbours laptop with some good signal strength software that came with the laptop and checked reception. It did not seem to be any different. Connecting it to the other WAP also seemed to have the same problem.
Of course all this connection and disconnection of antennas and WAPs disrupted our little network and one of my neighbours really needed to be online so I had to switch it all back and give up on the testing in frustration.
Thinking back now I seem to remember the WAPs have both an internal and external antenna. On their setup software you can force the use of the internal or external antenna but we have it set on automatic which in theory should choose the best but I am not sure what causes it to switch and exactly how it makes its decision. What I probably should have done is force it to use the external. That way I could be sure my results were correct.
So now I plan to test the integrity of it again and try forcing the WAP to use the new antenna.
